Laatste update: 02/11/2026
For hosts, by hosts
Fairhospitality.coop is a learning community of small-scale accommodation providers in Flanders. Not a consultancy firm telling you what to do, but hosts figuring out what works together. What suits a four-room B&B doesn’t necessarily fit a forty-room hotel. That’s why we compare, share, and discuss.
The digital tools on this site are there to feed that conversation. They measure, they calculate, and they keep track of your file. What they don’t do is make the decision for you. That remains human work, and it happens in the forums.
Collective intelligence, stronger than artificial intelligence. Static pages explain what we think; the forums keep it alive. The knowledge is open access under CC-BY-4.0, without a paywall.
This manual explains how to use the tools: how to calculate your footprint, how to weigh up whether a label suits you, and how to build a certification file. And above all: why they are the way they are.
The Four Steps
The website describes four steps you can take with the community. You don’t have to do them all, and not in this order. But the order is no coincidence.
1. Where do I stand now as a host?
You map out where you stand today: your energy and water consumption and your CO₂ emissions over a full year, converted per guest night so you can measure yourself against comparable accommodations. That is your baseline measurement. Not a score you have to achieve, but a starting point that everything else builds on. The tool for this is the footprint module.
2. Embedding in your daily operations
Figures only become useful when you know what they mean and what you can do with them. For each theme, we have outlined concrete actions for energy, water, waste, purchasing, mobility, and green management. In the peer group, you look together at which measures yield the most, because time and budget are limited.
3. Certification as a learning path
A label is a means, not an end. First, the question of whether it’s worth it: you weigh that up with “Does a label suit you? If so, which one?”. If you decide on a label, Certification helps you fill in the criteria, collect evidence, and put together your application file. “No label for now” is also a valid outcome.
4. Travel to Tomorrow
Consuming less is a beginning, not an end point. This step is about tourism that strengthens your village, nature, or neighborhood instead of just limiting damage, together with local partners.
And running through everything: the community
A figure tells you where you stand. It doesn’t tell you what to do about it. You learn that from someone who made the same choice last year, with the same budget and the same type of building.
In the forums, the talk is about charging stations, home batteries, heating systems, subsidies, and label criteria. Concrete questions, answers from hosts who have already done it. You don’t have to contribute anything to read along, but the community gets better as more people share their experience, including the failed experiments.
How This Manual Is Organized
Why and how. What a footprint does and doesn’t measure, how we calculate, how the benchmark works without anyone seeing your figures, and how we handle the impact of the platform itself.
A step-by-step plan for each tool. Screen by screen, what you need to do. Today that’s the footprint module; the label choice and Certification will follow.
Shared chapters. Creating and managing your accommodation, storing documents, sharing with someone else, and the emails you may receive. You use these in every tool, so they are described once.
Glossary. All abbreviations and terms in one place, from EAN to pppn.
At the bottom of each page, there is a button to download the full manual as a PDF, to pass on or to read on paper.
All chapters
How to navigate here. At the top of each page, you’ll find the index and the search field, and at the bottom, you can jump to the previous or next chapter. If you click on a link to the tool itself, it opens in a separate tab so you don’t lose your place in the text. Use the button at the bottom to save the full manual as a PDF.
Where do you start?
| Your situation | Start here |
|---|---|
| You want to know what your footprint is | Your footprint |
| You have an account but haven’t entered any figures yet | Quick Start |
| You want to know what data you need to collect | What information do you need? |
| Your grades are listed there | Publishing and the benchmark |
| You’re thinking about a label | Does a label fit you? If so, which one? |
| You have a question for other hosts | The forums |
About This Manual
This manual describes version 1.64.8 of the toolset, updated on 2 November 2026.
Does a screen look different to you than described here? Let us know in the forums. It means the manual has fallen behind, and we’d like to know.
