To support EU hotels to measure and communicate about their sustainability, stakeholders are invited to participate in a consultation to establish new rules for assessing the environmental impact of hotel accommodation services – the Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR).
The consultation is open to all stakeholders, including industry representatives, environmental organisations, consumer organisations, policy authorities, and the general public. It will be open until midnight 2 March 2025.
Interested stakeholders can submit their feedback online. To participate, an EU Login is required. To create it, please follow the instructions here.
A webinar for more information and to address questions will be organized on 12 February 2025, from 10:00 to 12:00 a.m. CEST. Register here
Once developed, this will help the EU hotel industry to be more sustainable:
- Providing solid evidence to substantiate green claims, providing credibility and trust among consumers looking for sustainable accommodation;
- Facilitating fair competition by allowing companies to compare their environmental footprint based on a harmonised method;
- Allowing industry to reduce efforts and costs by defining what matters most, effectively improve their environmental performance and tracking and ultimately invest in healthy environment;
Next steps
After the consultation period, the PEFCR Technical Secretariat will review all feedback and make the necessary changes to finalise the new rules. Based on additional input from stakeholders, the finalised draft is planned for the first half of 2026. The PEFCR will then be ready for application in the form of PEF studies in the second half of 2026.
Background
The project is funded by the EU and implemented jointly by a consortium coordinated by adelphi together with Studio Fieschi & soci and maki Consulting as PEFCR experts and technical leads. HOTREC – the European Association of Hotels, Restaurants, Pubs and Cafes and similar establishments in Europe – co-chairs, together with Studio Fieschi & soci, the Technical Secretariat of the project – the governing body that is developing the PEFCR. As a multi-stakeholder working group, the Technical Secretariat represents at least 51% of the EU hotel market.
The PEF is a comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method for quantifying the overall environmental impacts of products (goods or services), including carbon footprint, water footprint and a range of other environmental impacts geared towards reliability and reproducibility of the results. To reach this goal, a set of specific rules needs to be defined for the respective product category (hotel accommodation in this case), in the form of a PEFCR. This is the first time that PEF is applied to the tourism ecosystem and services.
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