Designing Sustainable Hotels: Best Practices for LEED Certification

Sustainability procedures have become a priority for the hospitality industry, and the concept of sustainable design is strongly affecting the brands policies. Eco-efficient hotels respond, such as all high-performance... [ view full abstract ]

Sustainability procedures have become a priority for the hospitality industry, and the concept of sustainable design is strongly affecting the brands policies. Eco-efficient hotels respond, such as all high-performance buildings, to the global awareness of built environment in increasing climate change effect. Sustainable design requires architects, designers but also owners to understand the environment as a functioning system, highly impacted by their choices of where, what and how we build. For this reason, eco-efficient buildings incorporate design and construction practices that limit or remove the negative effect of the construction on the environment.

This research explores the relation between LEED certification for hospitality and sustainable design principles. Considered the fact that there is not any other certification program than LEED that puts together sustainable tourism and green design, we focus only on this rating system. The main objective of the study is defining the best practices and the most common strategies adopted in hospitality design to achieve LEED credits. In fact, there is a lack of specific bibliography about sustainable design for the hospitality facilities, while we can find a rich literature for green buildings and LEED in general.

In the first part of the study we analyze the LEED rating system and the credits distribution to find out which credits, and therefore sustainable strategies, are preferred by companies in order to achieve certification. We analyze the 123 LEED scorecards provided by the USGBC, extracting the number of points they earned in each credits group.

In the second part we will present three examples of LEED Platinum certified hotels in the US, describing which design choices they made in order to achieve the highest certification level.

We can affirm that hotels pursue first those points with higher return of investment and minor cost of operation. Also, the choice should be done according to the specific condition of the site. External factors, both physical and economic ones, are very important in order to give priority to some strategies.

This study can give industry a better support to take the most efficient and profitable design choices in order to obtain LEED certification.