Advito Unveils Hotel Sustainability Scoring Framework

Business travel consultancy Advito has developed a quantitative framework to score hotels' sustainability efforts, designed to provide buyers evaluation criteria particularly in the sourcing process, the company announced late last week. 

For the new tool, dubbed the Hotel Sustainability Index, participating hotels have provided Advito, which is the consulting arm of travel management company BCD Travel, with sustainability-related information like carbon emissions, water consumption and energy use among other categories, Advito managing consultant for sustainability Amélie Losanes told BTN Friday. 

Advito's goal, Losanes said, is to provide buyers—and eventually travelers at the point of sale—with additional comparative sustainability information to consider when evaluating properties for inclusion in a corporate program.

"This is not a certification, it's a score," Losanes said. "What's different than what is in the market today is that you'll see very often that online booking tools, for instance, display the CO2 or the eco-certification. But what we wanted to do was find a system that looks at travel data rather than just CO2 or just eco certification."

The HSI takes into account not only carbon emissions, water consumption and energy use but also eco certifications and initiatives like recycling and use of single-use plastics. Hotels that are transparent about their data receive credit toward a higher score, Losanes said. Scores are offered in absolute terms but also in relative geographical terms, to allow for comparisons among hotels in areas where energy use is higher, for example.

Advito will calculate scores for properties that do not cooperate by using benchmarks derived from Hotel Carbon Measurement Initiative standards and its own Gate4 emissions-tracking measurement methodology. Those hotels receive no transparency credit. 

Losanes didn't specify the number of hotels from which Advito has collected data for HSI but said the consultancy had worked with BCD's preferred lodging chain suppliers, representing "all the big chains," to incorporate their data.

"It's been a pretty big lift," Losanes said. "We've been working on it for close to a year to be able to not just gather the data, but we also wanted not to reinvent the wheel. The reason why it took us so long to roll this out is we had a lot of consultation with our partners, the hotel chains on the BCD side, to present them the model and what we were trying to achieve. From there, they essentially validated that they felt comfortable with us working in this way."

HSI data is available for BCD corporate clients to use for free in sourcing initiatives. How they do so, Losanes said, will depend on the buyer's perspective on sustainability.

"It would be just one more factor that the travel manager can use," Losanes said. "We also will provide in-depth analysis for top markets, which would be the role of a consultant from the sustainability team, looking at hotels listed in the [request for proposals] and providing in-depth information on those sustainability initiatives so the client can make a decision.

"It depends on the maturity of the travel program of the client and also the willingness to bring sustainability into the fold," she continued. "But at first it can be an education tool to see how sustainable the hotels are in a specific market for a client, and then they can take it further if they wish to do so."

BCD is piloting the incorporation of HSI scores into its TripSource online booking tool and plans to fully roll out such functionality in the first quarter of 2026. The company also indicated a willingness to provide the data to other OBTs, a process that also could be ready in the first quarter.

Advito's initiative comes at a time of possibly diverging views of the value of sustainability initiatives in business travel, particularly in the United States. Still, Losanes said it remains a key factor for most Advito clients.

"We definitely see some shifts. It's a representation of the political landscape, in the U.S. specifically," she said. "But generally the clients we work with are all very passionate with sustainability, and they are still keeping it on the roadmap. And even [if] the political landscape may not be as open to sustainability today, I think sustainability is here to stay. From that standpoint, I'm not really worried if there is a little bit of a dip right now in interest, because global warming is very, very real, and it will continue to become a priority."