Cornell Study Finds Eco-Certified Hotels Are More Resource Efficient
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Study Finds Correlation Between Eco-Certification, Efficiency
A recent study from the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research (CHR) at the School of Hotel Administration has found that when hotels earn a certification for environmental sustainability, as an unexpected benefit they also tend to run more efficiently.
In the study, "Exploring the Relationship between Eco-certifications and Resource Efficiency in U.S. Hotels," written by Jie J. Zhang, Nitin Joglekar, Rohit Verma, and Janelle Heineke, Cornell's researchers tested the operating efficiency of U.S. hotels using financial performance data from PKF Hospitality. Hotels that had earned the "Eco-Leaf" designation from Travelocity.com were more efficient in several areas of resource use than hotels that did not have eco-certification.
The authors state that the “study examines the impact of eco-certifications on two aspects of resource efficiency in hotel operations—operational efficiency and guest-driven efficiency. We analyze the effect of the Travelocity.com’s ecoleaf label, which designates hotels that have received eco-certification from any of several organizations. To earn the ecoleaf, the certification must be from a second or third party and must be available for audit. We analyze the relationship between eco-certifications and resource efficiency driven by both operations and customers. Using a large scale dataset from PKF Hospitality Research on the U.S. hotel industry, we found that eco-certified hotels recorded higher operations-driven and customer-driven resource efficiency. While the specific ratios vary according to a hotel’s chain scale, it’s clear that this group of U.S. hotels benefited from earning certification.”
PKF Hospitality provided data on hotel spending. The study examined both guest-related expenditures (which are driven by guests' activities) and the hotels' own operating expenditures. Expenses in both categories were significantly lower in eco-certified four-star hotels. The effect also occurred in three-star and five-star hotels, but the difference was not as strong.
An earlier studied co-authored by Rhoit Verma, titled, “Hotel Sustainability: Financial Analysis Shines a Cautious Green Light,” found that going green is compatible with existing quality standards of hotel service, and that advertising green status doesn’t hurt a hotel’s revenues.
Author Verma stated, "As we all know, the hotel industry has been hoping to see improved sales or market position from environmental sustainability, but maybe we have all been looking in the wrong place for the benefits from eco-certification.”
"The intriguing thing here is that this study shows a benefit from sustainability initiatives that has been hidden in plain sight. The fact that eco-certified hotels are more efficient is even more interesting because many hotel operators were worried that sustainability would be more expensive, not less."