Green Key
International · hotels and hostelsRun by the Foundation for Environmental Education, in Spain through ADEAC. More than 9,000 properties in more than 90 countries. Independent on-site audit and a certificate valid for 24 months.
Hostelum ECO
Your hotel can get certified. We tell you exactly what you are missing.
Inside Hostelum you have an environmental diagnostic that scores your property, ranks what needs fixing by impact and effort, and keeps the records an auditor is going to ask you for. No spreadsheets, and no starting from scratch the day you decide to get certified.
- Included in your plan, at no extra cost
- Questionnaire by area, with a score and a history
- Improvement plan ordered by priority
Why now
Getting certified has stopped being a nice touch
The platforms have changed their criteria, guests ask about it, and public bodies are starting to score it in tenders and grant schemes. What makes it interesting is that Spain still has very few certified properties: whoever gets there early genuinely stands out.
59
properties with the EU Ecolabel in the whole of Spain
Figures from October 2024. That is the fifth-highest number in the European Union, behind France, Austria, Italy and Slovenia. For the size of the Spanish hotel stock, the gap is enormous.
853
Spanish organisations registered under EMAS, with 1,443 sites
European Commission, November 2024. Spain is the third country in the Union by number of registered organisations, behind only Germany and Italy.
2024
the year Booking.com moved to prioritising third-party certifications
On 25 March 2024 it withdrew its own "Travel Sustainable" programme and announced that it would move to recognising certifications issued by independent bodies, with a search filter of its own. What counts now is the real label.
The diagnostic
What the ECO module actually does
You answer a good-practice questionnaire organised by area —energy, water, waste, purchasing, staff training and guest communication— and the module does the rest.
A score you can track over time
The result is saved with its date, so you see the trend rather than a one-off snapshot. It is exactly what an audit asks for when it wants to know what you have improved since last year.
An improvement plan ordered by priority
Not a list of a hundred ideas, but what to do first. Every action comes with what it delivers and what it costs to put in place, so that you start with what pays off.
Consumption, recorded month by month
Water, energy and waste are logged at their proper intervals. It is the most tedious job in any certification and the one most people abandon halfway through.
An internal PDF report
To take to the management meeting, show to the consultant handling your certification or keep as next year’s starting point.
It is worth saying plainly: the module is a self-assessment. You fill it in yourself and no independent third party verifies it, so it is not a certification and does not replace one, and it does not generate any label to show your guests. What it does is get you ready for the real certification, which is the one that counts.
Where it takes you
The certifications it prepares you for
These are the ones the platforms and the public bodies recognise. They are issued by independent bodies after an audit, and they all start the same way: knowing where you stand and having your data in order.
EU Ecolabel
European Union · tourist accommodationThe official EU label, governed by Commission Decision (EU) 2017/175 and in force until 31 December 2027. There are 22 mandatory criteria and 45 optional ones, with a minimum of 20 points to obtain it.
EMAS
European Union · management systemThe EU scheme set out in Regulation (EC) 1221/2009. It is the most demanding of the three: it requires you to publish an environmental statement validated by an accredited verifier, with a full review every three years and a validated update in each intervening year.
Travelife
International · accommodationWidely recognised by European tour operators. It covers emissions, biodiversity, labour rights and animal welfare, with an independent audit and two-year certification. It publishes its fees by property size.
Biosphere
Spain · properties and destinationsFrom the Instituto de Turismo Responsable, Spanish in origin and widely adopted across destinations. Its indicators are aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement.
EarthCheck
International · benchmarkingAn Australian programme based on comparing your data with the sector year after year. It asks for energy, water, emissions, chemicals, paper and waste, with an annual external audit.
Before signing up to any of them, check who audits and how often. The schemes change their rules more often than you would think, and not every well-known label keeps the same recognitions from one year to the next.
Where it really helps
Certifications do not ask for intentions: they ask for records
This is the real reason a PMS makes the difference here. The criteria are not met with a statement of principles, they are met by producing monthly data series at the audit. And either you keep that data from day one, or you end up rebuilding it by hand the month before.
Water and energy consumption, every month
Green Key criteria 4.1 and 7.1 require them to be recorded at least once a month, unusual increases to be investigated and the full record to be produced at the audit.
Waste, at its proper intervals
Criterion 6.10 asks for a record of the total amount of waste, preferably broken down by category. It is the figure most often forgotten and the one that holds up a certification most.
Consumption per occupied room
The indicator that benchmarking schemes really compare is not total consumption, it is consumption per occupied room-night. That denominator lives in your PMS: it is your real occupancy.
Training, purchasing and documentation
The EU Ecolabel devotes the whole of its criterion 5 to monitoring consumption and criterion 27 to sub-metering by area. Green Key expressly allows the entire audit folder to be electronic.
And in the meantime
What you stop spending from day one
Even before you start thinking about a certification, digitising the front desk has two effects that can be calculated. Here they are, with the calculation in plain sight so that you can redo it with your own figures.
Paper avoided · 40-room hotel, one year
- Average occupancy
- 65 %
- Stays per year
- ≈ 3,800
- Sheets per stay
- 4
- Sheets per year
- 15,200
- Emission factor per A4 sheet
- 6.70 g CO₂e
Per year
102 kg CO₂e
The four sheets are the registration card, the guest registration report, the invoice and the receipt handed to the guest. The per-sheet factor comes from the official UK DESNZ 2026 factor for virgin-material paper (1,343.59 kg CO₂e per tonne) divided across the 200,400 A4 sheets of 80 g/m² that fit in a tonne. It is not the bulk of a hotel’s footprint —that sits in heating, cooling and hot water— but it is yours, it is measurable and it is one of the few that solves itself.
41 g
of CO₂e per kWh on the electricity grid that powers our servers
A 2025 figure on a full life cycle basis, according to Ember. The European Union average was 209 g and the world average 458 g in the same year and with the same method. The data is hosted in data centres in the European Union.
1.24
PUE at the data centres where Hostelum is hosted
Power usage effectiveness published by our infrastructure provider for its estate in the 2025 financial year, measured in accordance with ISO 30134-2 and with limited assurance from an independent auditor. The sector average was 1.54 in the Uptime Institute’s 2025 survey. These are the provider’s figures about its own data centres, not a measurement of our service.
Frequently asked questions
Does the ECO module certify my hotel?
No, and it is important that you know this up front: certification can only be issued by an independent body after an audit. What the module does is the part that can be done without an auditor and that almost nobody does well: knowing where you stand, working out where to start and keeping the monthly records up to date for when the auditor arrives. It is the difference between turning up for the audit and putting it off for a year.
Does it cost extra?
No. The module is included in your Hostelum plan, at no additional cost and with no limit on how many times you repeat the diagnostic. What does cost money is the certification itself, which is charged by the certification body and varies quite a bit depending on the scheme and the size of the property.
Which certification suits me?
It depends on who you sell to. If you work with European tour operators, Travelife and Green Key are the most recognised. If you bid for public tenders or apply for grants, the EU Ecolabel and EMAS carry more weight because they are official EU schemes. If your market is mainly Spanish and destination-driven, Biosphere is widely adopted. The diagnostic gives you a score by area, which is exactly what you need in order to see which one you are closest to.
How long does it take to get certified?
Starting from scratch, between six months and a year is normal, and the bottleneck is almost never the building work: it is the data history. Several schemes require continuous monthly records of water, energy and waste, and if you start recording them the day you decide to get certified, you have to wait for the series to build up. That is why it is worth switching on the diagnostic even if certification is still a long way off.
What if my property is small?
That is where it shows most, because you have nobody dedicated to this. The schemes have bands by size and several are perfectly affordable for a small property. What is usually missing is not budget, it is order, and the diagnostic with its automatic records solves precisely that part.
Where is my data hosted?
In data centres in the European Union, with daily backups. It matters for this conversation: the carbon intensity of the electricity grid is what weighs most in the emissions of a cloud service, and the grid that powers our servers emitted 41 g of CO₂e per kWh in 2025 against the European Union average of 209 g, on a full life cycle basis and with the same calculation method.
Where these figures come from
Every figure on this page comes from public documents, with its year. They are here so that you can check them. If you spot an error, write to us and we will correct it.
- EMAS and Ecolabel registrations in Spain
- European Commission, EMAS key figures as at November 2024. EU Tourism Transition Pathway, Ecolabel licences by country, October 2024.
- Certification criteria
- Green Key, criteria for hotels and hostels. Commission Decision (EU) 2017/175, EU Ecolabel criteria for tourist accommodation. Regulation (EC) 1221/2009 (EMAS).
- Booking.com change of criteria
- Autoriteit Consument & Markt (ACM), Netherlands, note "Booking.com takes Travel Sustainable program offline following ACM action", 25 March 2024.
- Paper emission factor
- DESNZ (United Kingdom), greenhouse gas reporting conversion factors, 2026 edition: 1,343.59 kg CO₂e per tonne of virgin-material paper.
- Carbon intensity of electricity grids
- Ember, Yearly Electricity Data, 2025, full life cycle: 41 g on the grid that powers our data centres, a European Union average of 209 g and a world average of 458 g, in CO₂e per kWh.
- Data centres
- The regulated annual report of our infrastructure provider, 2025 financial year, with limited assurance from an independent auditor; we identify the provider in the contract and in the data processing documentation. Uptime Institute, Global Data Center Survey 2025: weighted average of 1.54 across 681 self-declared responses.
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