Laatste update: 02/11/2026
A footprint is not a label or a grade. It is a measurement of a part of your impact, with boundaries you need to know to make it useful.
What we measure
Energy in all its forms: electricity, gas, heating oil, pellets, solar energy, heat pumps, and whatever else enters your building. Water, split into drinking water, rainwater, and groundwater. And the CO₂ that results from them.
CO₂ involves two types. Scope 1 is what you burn yourself: your gas boiler, your heating oil, your pellets. Scope 2 is the emissions generated elsewhere to produce your electricity or heat. See How we calculate.
What we consciously do not measure yet
Waste. Food and purchasing. Biodiversity and land use. The emissions of everything you buy, known in technical terms as scope 3.
This is not an oversight. These items are difficult to measure reliably for a small accommodation, and a bad figure is worse than no figure, because you will base decisions on it. They are, however, on the agenda.
Two perspectives, and they are both true
There is a nuance here that is easily misunderstood.
From your perspective as a host, making your operation ecologically possible is exactly where you come in. Your building, your heating, your water, your purchasing: that is what you control, and that is where your greatest individual impact lies. That is what this footprint is for.
From the perspective of your guest’s journey, the ratio is different. There, mobility carries by far the most weight, and consumption (food, drinks, souvenirs) and activities (from a museum visit to a helicopter flight) also count significantly. The stay itself is then a smaller part of the whole.
Both are correct. They are different system boundaries, not contradictory figures. More on that in Putting accommodation certification in perspective.
What that means for you: use your footprint to manage your own consumption, and additionally look for where you can influence your guest’s journey. The latter is known as scope 4, and it is often the biggest lever for an accommodation. See Scope 4 in tourism.
Your footprint is therefore not a complete picture of your total impact. Use it for what it is intended for, and do not use it to claim that your total footprint is low.
Why incomplete measurement is better than no measurement
Waiting until you can measure everything means never starting. Energy and water are exactly the items you control, that you pay for monthly, and where a measure becomes immediately visible. So that’s where you start.
The second argument is comparability: the more accommodations measure the same limited set, the more useful the comparison. A rich but unique measurement framework offers nothing to benchmark yourself against.
Why we divide by person-nights
Absolute figures say nothing about how efficiently you work. A large hotel consumes more than a B&B, and a busy year more than a quiet year. By dividing by the number of person-nights, you remove those two effects and are left with what you influence yourself.
It also has a downside: a well-filled accommodation scores more easily than an empty one. That is justifiable, because vacancy is also a form of waste, but it is good to know when interpreting your figure.
