"A personal guide to booking sustainable accommodation when you travel"

I travel a lot for work. My family also enjoys a lovely trip somewhere exotic and preferably sunny. Of course, travel is complicated, and we all have a lot of requirements we need to meet. When we travel together, we need a family-friendly location for our little ones. We could stay in a hotel. But usually, a short-term rental apartment is our preferred choice because it will have laundry facilities making it possible to wash our naughty little one’s clothes and reduce the luggage we have to bring. I have dietary restrictions which make it tricky to eat in many restaurants, so this is also my preferred type of stay – apartments have their own kitchens. If we’re there on business, your extra space in apartments enables us to work far more conveniently. It’s very convenient for the apartments to be professionally cleaned and maintained – otherwise in our experience you’re basically entering a lottery. (The stories I could tell you about the awful filthy places we inadvertently booked from private landlords… but I digress.) So we prefer serviced apartments. We know they will be maintained at a high standard, and we know cleaning and other services will be available during the stay if required.

But there’s another great reason.

Why Apartments are a great choice over Hotels.

-Sustainability

In my family, we’re all too aware of our impact on our planet, so at home, we have an electric car. We have complicated heating that only heats a zone at a time to reduce emissions. We use low-energy lighting. We even try to reduce our plastic waste, preferring natural fibre fabrics and we all pitch in to sort the garbage for recycling. It might be just a small step. But it’s good to try!

It turns out that apartments are a much more sustainable choice compared to hotel stays. This makes sense when you think about it. A hotel is a massive building with a fancy lobby, dining areas, kitchens, possibly conference facilities, meeting rooms, staff areas and so on. That’s a lot of space to heat, light, clean, and maintain.

• According to a recent article in Property Week, “average carbon emissions per square meter for UK hotels is 54.3kgCO₂eq/m²… the highest average carbon emissions per square meter for any commercial sector in the UK.” That’s terrifying… but somehow should we be surprised? Every UK hotel always seems to super-heat its interiors to the point that I cannot sleep! And the so-called climate control in the hotel rooms never works because it’s controlled centrally by the hotel.

In contrast, the recent study by TheSqua.re shows that apartments – particularly studio and one-bed apartments – are especially efficient. Their emissions are typically about 7kgCO₂/m² - that’s less than a fifth of a hotel. Not only that, you get to control the temperature yourself in your own apartment! It makes a real difference to the stay.

Of course, not all apartments are created equally in this respect. An apartment in a fabulous period building might have been upgraded and it might be highly sustainable… or it might not, in which case it’ll be no more sustainable than a stay in the overheated hotel around the corner. An apartment in a seemingly stunning modern block might have a five-star rating for sustainability. Or it might not – in which case you’ll be looking through chilly single-glazed glass and feeling cold due to ineffective radiators.

So how can you know which apartments are the sustainable (and comfortable) ones?

Looking around at many websites for rental apartments it’s clear that most of the CO2 reporting is simply wrong. If you read the small print on some of the sites they say that they use figures from the hotel sector! Is that crazy or what? It’s like me reporting the emissions of my electric car by using a petrol car for my data!

Wouldn’t it be just great if there were a rating that could tell us this information accurately?

That’s where EcoGrade™ comes in. Just go to the www.thesqua.re website, and as you search, check out the EcoGrade™ scores. A five “leaf” rating is as good as it gets. Click on the score and you can see how it is broken down: How efficient is the apartment in terms of its insulation, heating, and lighting? How much energy does it normally consume? Does it have easy walking access to green transportation options? Is the energy supplier using renewable sources?

If you are an owner, then you should read about why make your properties more sustainable.

Final Thoughts

You know you can trust EcoGrade™ because it’s backed by science – there are now two published scientific papers showing how well it works. But you can also trust it because we care about making it right. We’ve spent years obtaining data and finding innovative ways of processing it, to make EcoGrade™. It’s the industry-leading metric for measuring the sustainability of apartments. If you want to know more about EcoGrade™, then check out our blog on TheSquare Research Briefing: EcoGrade.

As our little girl grows up in a society becoming ever more concerned about our planet, we hope that EcoGrade™ and solutions like this will help give everyone the sustainable choices they now demand.