Going Green Is Not Enough: Why Many Hotels Still Fail at Sustainable Hospitality

By Dr. Juliana Philip Ndalnamu

Walk into almost any hotel today and you'll find the same laminated card propped against the bathroom mirror: "Help us save the planet, reuse your towel." It's a familiar ritual of modern travel, repeated in thousands of properties across the world. And it feels good. Guests nod along, hotels print it on their websites and everyone leaves believing something meaningful just happened for the environment.

But here's the uncomfortable truth I've arrived at after years of researching sustainable hospitality: towel reuse is not sustainability. It's theatre.

What My Research Has Revealed

Over the past few years, my research has focused on understanding and estimating the environmental impacts of hospitality operations within the Nigerian context. Through my work on carbon footprint assessments in hotels, one finding has consistently emerged:

The greatest environmental impacts are rarely the most visible ones.

While many hotels emphasize guest-facing environmental initiatives, substantial emissions often arise from energy-intensive operations such as electricity consumption, diesel generator use, air conditioning systems, laundry operations, and food waste. This reinforces an important lesson: Sustainable hospitality begins with measurement. Hotels cannot effectively reduce what they cannot quantify.

This article makes the case that "going green" has become a slogan detached from evidence and that genuine hotel sustainability requires something far less glamorous than a laminated card. It requires measurement.

Luxury hotel bathroom with towels, bathtub, and guest amenities, highlighting hospitality operations where water, energy, and laundry management influence hotel sustainability.

The Rise of "Going Green" as a Marketing Slogan

Sustainable tourism is no longer a niche concern. Guests ask about it. Investors screen for it. Governments legislate around it. In response, hotels have learned to speak the language of green hospitality, sometimes too fluently.

"Going green" sells. It signals responsibility, modernity, and cost-consciousness all at once. A property that talks about eco-friendliness can charge a premium, attract environmentally conscious travelers, and generate favorable press, all without necessarily changing its underlying environmental footprint.

This is not unique to hospitality. Across industries, this phenomenon has a name: greenwashing. And hotels, with their highly visible guest-facing spaces, are particularly well positioned to practice it, intentionally or not.

In Nigeria, where many hotels depend heavily on diesel generators because of inconsistent electricity supply. The problem isn't that hotels want to appear sustainable. The problem is that many have confused appearing sustainable with being sustainable.

Common Misconceptions about Sustainable Hotels

Ask a hotel manager what makes their property sustainable, and you'll often hear a familiar list:

• "We reuse towels and linens."
• "We have recycling bins in the lobby."
• "We switched to LED bulbs."
• "We removed plastic straws."

These are not bad initiatives. But they share a common flaw: they are visible, low-cost actions that guests can see, not necessarily the actions with the greatest environmental impact.

Sustainability has been reduced, in far too many properties, to a set of guest-facing gestures. Meanwhile, the systems that consume the most energy, water, and resources the ones guests never see remain largely unmeasured and unmanaged.

This is the core misconception: that sustainability is a set of practices you can announce, rather than a set of impacts you must quantify.

Why Towel Reuse Alone Does Not Make a Hotel Sustainable

Let's be specific. A mid-sized hotel that successfully encourages 80% of guests to reuse their towels might reduce laundry-related water use by a modest margin. It's genuinely useful.

But compare that saving to the hotel's other operations:

• The diesel generator running through a multi-hour power outage.
• Central air conditioning system cooling entire wings of empty rooms.
• Walk-in freezers preserving food that will later be thrown away.

Towel reuse addresses a visible drop in the ocean while ignoring the ocean itself. It is a symbolic gesture that has become, unintentionally, a substitute for real environmental accountability.

This is why researchers and practitioners alike must ask a harder question: not "what are we doing that looks green?" But "what are we doing that reduces our environmental footprint and can we prove it?"

The Hidden Environmental Impacts Hotels Rarely Talk About

Genuine hotel sustainability requires confronting operational realities that don't fit neatly on a laminated card.

Electricity Consumption

Hotels are energy-intensive by design, with lighting, elevators, kitchens, and entertainment systems running around the clock. Electricity use is frequently the single largest contributor to a hotel's carbon footprint, yet many properties still don't track consumption at a granular, departmental level.

Diesel Generators

In regions with unreliable grid power, much of sub-Saharan Africa included, diesel generators are a daily reality, not a backup plan. These generators emit significant greenhouse gases and are rarely included in a hotel's public sustainability claims, despite sometimes running for hours every single day.

Air Conditioning

Cooling is one of the most energy-hungry systems in any hotel, particularly in tropical and desert climates. Poorly maintained or oversized HVAC systems waste enormous amounts of electricity, yet air conditioning efficiency rarely appears in hotel sustainability reports.

Food Waste

From buffet over-preparation to plate waste, food loss in hotels carries both financial and environmental costs, including the greenhouse gases released when discarded food decomposes in landfill. Very few properties measure food waste systematically, let alone report on it.

Water Consumption

Beyond guest room usage, water is consumed heavily in kitchens, swimming pools, gardens, and laundry facilities. In water-stressed regions, this is not a minor operational detail; it's a matter of community and ecological consequence.

Laundry Operations

Industrial laundry systems consume large volumes of water, energy, and chemical detergents. Ironically, the very towel and linen programs hotels promote as "green" often mask the fact that laundry remains one of the most resource-intensive back-of-house operations.

Transportation

Airport shuttles, staff commutes, and supply chain logistics all contribute to a hotel's broader carbon footprint, a dimension of hotel carbon emissions that rarely receives attention in sustainability marketing, despite falling squarely within what ESG frameworks call Scope 3 emissions.

Waste segregation system showing separate collection of recyclable and organic materials as an environmental sustainability indicator for resource conservation.

Why Hotels Must Measure, Not Just Claim, Sustainability

There is a principle in management theory, often attributed to Peter Drucker, that applies with striking precision to hospitality: "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."

A hotel that claims to be sustainable without measuring its energy use, water consumption, or carbon output is, in effect, making an unverifiable promise. It may be true. It may not be. Without data, no one - not the hotel, not the guest, not the regulator - can know.

This distinction matters enormously as scrutiny of ESG in hospitality intensifies. Investors are beginning to demand more disclosure. Governments are introducing reporting requirements tied to national climate commitments. Guests, particularly younger travelers, are asking pointed questions that go beyond towel cards.

Measurement transforms sustainability from a marketing claim into a management discipline. It is the difference between a hotel saying it cares about the environment and a hotel knowing, with evidence, what its impact actually is and having a credible plan to reduce it.

The Importance of Carbon Footprint Assessment

Of all the metrics available to hotels, the carbon footprint assessment deserves particular attention. It is the single most comprehensive indicator of a property's environmental impact, because it aggregates energy use, transportation, waste, and supply chain activity into one comparable figure.

A robust carbon footprint assessment typically considers three categories of emissions:

1. Direct emissions — from generators, boilers, and owned vehicles.
2. Indirect emissions — from purchased electricity.
3. Value chain emissions — from suppliers, guest travel, and waste disposal.

Hotels that conduct this kind of assessment gain something towel programs can never provide: a baseline. A baseline is essential because it allows a property to track progress toward Net Zero commitments, benchmark against industry peers, and identify where interventions will have the greatest effect.

Without this baseline, sustainability strategy is guesswork dressed up as commitment.

Key Sustainability Indicators Every Hotel Should Track

Beyond carbon footprint, several indicators form the backbone of credible hotel sustainability performance:

• Energy efficiency — consumption per occupied room, benchmarked over time.
• Water conservation — usage per guest night, tracked across departments.
• Waste management — landfill diversion rates, recycling volumes, and food waste tonnage.
• Sustainable procurement — the proportion of local, certified, or low-impact suppliers.
• Renewable energy adoption — the share of total energy sourced from solar, wind, or other renewables.

Together, these indicators create a dashboard far more informative than any loyalty card could ever be. They also align naturally with global frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 6 (clean water), SDG 7 (affordable and clean energy), SDG 12 (responsible consumption), and SDG 13 (climate action).

Key environmental performance indicators that hotels should monitor to measure and improve sustainability performance.

"If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Manage It" — Applied to Hotels

It's worth pausing on this principle, because it is not merely a management cliché it is the central argument of this article.

Consider two hotels. Hotel A promotes towel reuse, recycling bins, and a "green" logo on its website. Hotel B has never mentioned sustainability publicly, but tracks its electricity use per room, monitors generator hours, measures food waste weekly, and benchmarks its carbon footprint annually.

Which hotel is more sustainable?

Based on visible marketing alone, Hotel A looks like the clear winner. But without data, we cannot know whether Hotel A's environmental impact is improving, worsening, or simply invisible. Hotel B, despite saying nothing, is positioned to manage and reduce its footprint over time.

This is the trap of appearance-based sustainability: it optimises for perception rather than performance. Measurement flips that equation. It makes environmental accountability possible.

GREEN HOTEL

↓

Measure

Energy

↓

Water

↓

Waste

↓

Transport

↓

Carbon Footprint

↓

Continuous Improvement

↓

True Sustainability

Who Benefits from Evidence-Based Sustainability?

Moving from claims to measurements is not just an academic preference, it delivers concrete benefits across the entire hospitality ecosystem.

Hotel Managers

Data reveals inefficiencies that would otherwise go unnoticed an oversized chiller, a leaking pipe, an underperforming generator often translating directly into cost savings alongside environmental gains.

Guests

Increasingly, climate-conscious travellers gain the ability to make genuinely informed choices, rather than relying on symbolic gestures that may or may not reflect real impact.

Investors

ESG-focused capital is growing rapidly, and investors need verifiable data, not marketing copy, to assess climate risk and long-term asset resilience.

Governments

Policymakers pursuing national climate targets need accurate sector-level data to design effective regulations, incentives, and reporting standards for tourism and hospitality.

Researchers

Academics gain access to richer datasets, enabling more rigorous studies on climate resilience, environmental performance, and the true drivers of sustainable outcomes in hospitality operations.

Beyond Guest Satisfaction: A New Research Agenda for Hospitality

For decades, hospitality research has concentrated heavily on guest satisfaction, service quality, and financial performance. These remain important, but they are no longer sufficient. My ongoing TETFund National Research Fund project on hospitality carbon footprint estimation reinforces a simple but often overlooked truth: sustainability is not what hotels claim, it is what they can measure.

As climate change and tourism become increasingly intertwined through extreme weather, water scarcity, and shifting travel patterns, hospitality research must expand to treat environmental performance as a core outcome variable, not a peripheral topic.

This means:

• Studying energy and water consumption patterns across hotel typologies and climates.
• Investigating the real-world effectiveness of green certifications.
• Examining the relationship between carbon disclosure and financial performance.
• Exploring guest willingness to pay for verified, rather than claimed, sustainability.

Environmental performance indicators deserve the same rigour, replication, and peer scrutiny that guest satisfaction metrics have received for the past thirty years.

Emerging Research Opportunities in Sustainable Hospitality

Several promising avenues are opening up for scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of hospitality and environmental science:

• Smart metering and IoT-based Energy monitoring in hotel operations.
• Comparative carbon footprint studies across hotel star-ratings, regions, and ownership models.
• Behavioural research on guests Engagement that is genuine (versus symbolic) sustainability initiatives.
• Supply chain sustainability in hotel procurement, particularly in food and beverages.
• Climate adaptation strategies for coastal, arid, and disaster-prone tourism destinations.
• The financial materiality of ESG disclosure in publicly listed hotels groups.

These are not merely theoretical exercises. They represent the evidence base policymakers and industry leaders will need as sustainability reporting requirements tighten globally.

Researcher analyzing hotel sustainability data on a laptop with environmental icons

Practical Recommendations

For Hotel Managers

Begin with a baseline environmental audit: electricity, water, waste, and generator use before making any public sustainability claims. Invest in metering technology proportionate to your property's size.

For Researchers

Prioritise longitudinal, data-driven studies over descriptive surveys. Partner with hotels willing to share operational data in exchange for actionable insights.

For Policymakers

Develop clear, standardised reporting requirements for hotel carbon emissions and resource use, particularly in tourism-dependent economies where environmental and economic interests must be balanced carefully.

For the Industry as a Whole

Treat environmental accountability as a strategic capability, not a marketing department task. The hotels that will thrive under future regulatory and investor scrutiny are the ones building measurement systems today.

 

Conclusion: From Symbolic Gestures to Substantive Change

Going green has become easy to say and hard to prove. Towel cards, recycling bins, and LED bulbs are not without value, but they are not evidence of sustainability. They are the visible tip of a much larger, largely unmeasured iceberg.

Real sustainable hospitality demands something less photogenic than a laminated sign: rigorous measurement of electricity, water, waste, generators, laundry, and transportation, translated into a genuine carbon footprint and tracked over time.

The hotels, researchers, and policymakers who embrace this shift from claiming sustainability to measuring it will be the ones shaping the future of responsible tourism. The rest will simply keep reusing towels.

Join the Conversation

Are you researching sustainable hospitality?

Follow Research Tips with Dr. Juliana for evidence-based insights on hospitality, tourism, research methods, sustainability, and academic excellence.

If this article was valuable, share it with fellow researchers, postgraduate students, and hospitality professionals who are passionate about building a more sustainable tourism industry.

About the Author

Dr. Juliana Philip Ndalnamu is a hospitality management scholar, educator, and researcher with expertise in sustainable hospitality, tourism management, research methods, and environmental sustainability. Her work focuses on carbon footprint assessment, evidence-based hospitality practices, and building resilient tourism systems in developing economies. Through Research Tips with Dr. Juliana, she shares practical insights that bridge academic research and real-world application.