Measuring the Carbon Footprint of a sample of accommodation facilities in Italy

Tourism is amongst the fastest growing economic sectors, with the number of international arrivals increasing by almost 53% in the decade 2010-2019, a trend which was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic: international tourist arrivals decreased significantly in 2020-2021. However, in this sector an ever-growing attention has been paid to sustainability by various stakeholders over time, which has been intensified also by the need to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Online booking platforms have become one of the most common means of booking and reliable and concise information within them could guide the user in choosing more environmentally friendly or "green" accommodation facilities. This article explores the inclusion of Carbon Footprint (CF) as a possible life cycle-based indicator to be used in online booking platforms by addressing the CF of a selected sample of accommodation facilities in Italy. For this purpose, a nonprobabilistic sampling strategy has been implemented for exploratory analysis. Each identified accommodation included its own peculiarities from a sustainability viewpoint. Three of them agreed to collaborate and were then assessed in terms of their CF, by using CF-specific software. The results so far highlighted the energy consumption as one of the most impacting aspects.