Budget brand easyHotel has pledged to spend £4.5million to improve the green performance of 12 UK properties.
The cash will go towards the installation of heat pumps and solar panels at each of the hotels, along with investment in improved air conditioning systems, and better metering and control systems. The group says CO2 emissions should be cut by around 45% when the work is completed by 2025.
Single-use plastic bottles have already been removed from all owned and leased hotels, and guests can now refill their own bottles from free filtered water fountains in reception. The chain is also rolling out the use of wooden key cards certified from sustainably managed forests. It says the move will prevent 55,000 plastic key cards from being produced this year alone.
“The hotel industry accounts for about 1% of carbon emissions globally and we have a collective responsibility to do all we can to reduce these emissions,” explained easyHotels chief executive Karim Malak.
“Our business is naturally low-carbon thanks to our size-efficient room design which uses less raw materials, but it’s important for us to look at every area of our operations and try where we can, to be as low-carbon as possible.”
Elsewhere the group has partnered with carbon-neutral facilities management company Kanso for its cleaning contract. Ditching plastic bin liners from rooms and using refillable recycled bottles has led to a 42% cut in plastic waste associated with hotel cleaning since September 2022.
The locations benefiting from the investment are London Shoreditch, Croydon, Birmingham Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Milton Keynes, Ipswich, Cardiff, Newcastle and Glasgow. All the hotels will remain open during the works.
Similar low-carbon investment has been promised for its hotels in Belgium, France, Netherlands and Spain by the end of the year.
