Shared 26 May, 2026
The hospitality industry has spent years measuring carbon performance through a real estate lens: emissions per square metre. While this approach, championed by the Carbon Risk Real Estate Monitor (CRREM), remains critical for investors and regulators, a new whitepaper argues it does not fully reflect how hotels actually operate.
The report, Target Pathways for Hotels: Applying CRREM to the Hospitality Sector, was developed by Another Star — operator of citizenM hotels — together with PropTech platform BuildingMinds. It introduces a complementary metric: emissions per occupied room night.
The idea is simple. Hotels consume energy according to guest demand as much as building size. Heating, cooling, lighting and hot water rise and fall with occupancy, while some baseline energy use remains fixed regardless of how many guests stay overnight. Measuring emissions only per m² can therefore obscure operational realities.
To build the framework, the authors combined years of operational data from citizenM hotels with the Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking Index (CHSB), one of the sector’s most widely recognised sustainability datasets. BuildingMinds then translated CRREM’s science-based per-m² pathways into per-occupied-room-night targets while maintaining alignment with the Paris Agreement carbon budget.
The findings reveal why a dual-metric approach matters.
One of the clearest examples comes from citizenM Amsterdam Amstel. During the pandemic, occupancy collapsed, but the hotel building remained operational. As a result, emissions per m² stayed relatively stable — moving from 54 kgCO2e/m² in 2020 to 49 kgCO2e/m² in 2024.
However, emissions per occupied room night told a completely different story. The metric hit 22 kgCO2e per occupied room night in 2020 before falling to just 6.2 kgCO2e in 2023 as occupancy recovered. Energy intensity showed a similar pattern, dropping from 73.8 kWh per occupied room night in 2020 to roughly 25 kWh in 2023–2024.
According to the report, this demonstrates that “per-m² captures structural building performance independently of demand fluctuations, while per-occupied-room-night reflects the operational reality of delivering service to guests.”
Implications for operators
For hotel brands, the new metric could become increasingly valuable as corporate travel buyers demand clearer sustainability reporting. The paper notes that many companies now require emissions-per-stay data for procurement and Scope 3 reporting, while ESG-focused travellers are also asking a simpler question: what is the carbon impact of my stay?
Implications for investors
For investors, the framework provides a more nuanced understanding of operational efficiency. A compact urban hotel or amenity-heavy luxury property may appear carbon intensive on a per-m² basis, but perform strongly when evaluated per guest stay.
Impact of dual metrics on future capital allocation
The report also suggests that dual metrics could influence future capital allocation decisions. Retrofit projects such as heat pumps, upgraded HVAC systems and insulation improvements can be assessed not only for their impact on building emissions, but also for how efficiently they reduce the carbon footprint of each guest stay.
Importantly, the authors are not proposing that per-occupied-room-night replaces CRREM or regulatory benchmarks. Instead, they position it as an enhancement — one metric for compliance and asset-level comparability, the other for operational excellence and guest-facing transparency.
As Annalise Tyrie, ESG Director at Another Star, and Dr. Jens Hirsch, Chief Scientific Officer at BuildingMinds, write in the foreword, the goal is to create “a complementary lens that connects sustainability to guest experience and enables clearer stakeholder communication.”
For an industry balancing investor pressure, regulatory scrutiny and changing customer expectations, that second lens may become increasingly important.
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