In recent years, almost every corner of the hospitality industry has been touched by the sustainability wave. From eco-lodges in the rainforest to luxury resorts in the Alps, hotels today are branding themselves as “green,” “planet-positive,” or “conscious.” The term “sustainable hotel” has become both a badge of honour and a marketing buzzword.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: sustainability in the hotel industry feels complex, unclear and at times, deeply performative and here’s why.

1. Sustainability Looks Different Everywhere But We Treat It the Same

There is no universal standard for what a sustainable hotel actually is. One hotel might focus on reducing energy consumption, another on sourcing organic food, another on eliminating plastic. And all three might call themselves sustainable.

The problem is that sustainability isn’t a one-size-fits-all model. It’s deeply local. A hotel in the arid outback of Australia should not be judged by the same water benchmarks as one in Norway. A traditional homestay in rural Nepal that relies on ancestral farming methods shouldn’t be measured against a resort in Switzerland with access to advanced tech and capital.

But current sustainability standards often overlook this nuance. They create a global framework for what is ultimately a context-based practice. And when that happens, real accountability gets diluted and the wrong things are rewarded.

2. Green Signals Are Loud, But Real Effort Is Often Silent

Most travelers today recognize surface-level sustainability: refillable water bottles, towel reuse cards, solar panels. These are visible cues, and hotels promote them accordingly.

But the invisible work such as ethical treatment of staff, composting food waste, supporting local artisans, conserving biodiversity is often ignored or undervalued because it doesn’t make for easy marketing.

This creates a “signal vs. substance” gap. A resort might plant a few trees and get applauded for being green, while a homestay that pays fair wages, protects local culture, and uses natural materials gets zero recognition because it lacks certification or glossy storytelling.

As a result, genuine sustainability often goes unseen, and greenwashing thrives.

3. Certification: A System Meant to Help Has Turned into a Maze

The hotel industry today is flooded with sustainability certifications over a hundred of them globally. Each uses its own criteria, benchmarks, and frameworks.

Instead of simplifying the process, this certification boom has confused hotels and guests alike. Small hotels are unsure which badge to pursue. Guests don’t know which ones are trustworthy or what they even mean. The core value of certification, which is the clarity is lost.

What’s worse, the system privileges hotels that can afford the time, money, and manpower to go through rigorous audits and applications. This locks out many family-run lodges, rural retreats, and Indigenous accommodations that are often far more sustainable in practice.

So while certifications were created to create trust and standardisation, they now create exclusion, elitism, and overwhelm.

4. The Irony: Truly Sustainable Hotels Are Often Left Out of the Conversation

Sustainability isn’t new to many communities. For countless Indigenous, rural, or family-run accommodations, sustainability is how they’ve always lived using local materials, respecting the land, minimising waste, feeding guests food from their gardens.

But these places rarely have the marketing budgets, digital literacy, or certification resources to tell their story. So the narrative is dominated by well-funded hotels that can afford consultants and communications teams. Those already rooted in sustainability are often made invisible by the very system meant to highlight them.

This is the fundamental injustice: the most authentic players are being ignored because they don’t look the part.

Apart from all these challenges, the term “sustainable hotel” itself is deeply problematic. It reduces an evolving, place-based, and community-rooted practice

into a fixed label, often used more for marketing than meaning.

So...What’s the Problem With the Term “Sustainable Hotel”?

The phrase implies a fixed identity as if once a hotel ticks enough boxes, it has reached sustainability and can stay there.

But in truth, sustainability is not a destination it’s a continuous, evolving practice. It’s about being in relationship with a place, its people, and its ecosystem. That journey changes with seasons, with social conditions, with learning.

By calling a hotel “sustainable,” we risk turning a living, breathing process into a static marketing label.

It also centralises the idea of sustainability within the hospitality industry itself, rather than in the communities and ecologies it depends on. It makes sustainability feel like a top-down initiative hotels implement, instead of a bottom-up movement they support and are part of.

We Need a Shift: From Certification to Context, From Labels to Lived Practice

The path forward isn’t about abandoning standards, it’s about reimagining them. We need a system that:

Respects local contexts: Water conservation means different things in dry vs. wet regions. Energy benchmarks must consider geography and access.
Celebrates cultural sustainability: Indigenous design, food sovereignty, and ancestral farming matter as much as carbon reduction.

Enables small players: We must support small, rural, family-owned stays that already practice sustainability but are excluded from the mainstream model. Builds from the bottom up: The people living in these places should shape the sustainability narrative, not just consultants or external certifying bodies.

Conclusion: Let’s Drop the Label and Focus on the Work

Sustainability in hospitality is not a checklist. It’s not a label. It’s a relationship with nature, with local people, with history, with culture. And relationships are not standardised. They are nurtured.

Instead of asking “Is this hotel sustainable?” we should ask:

What is this hotel doing to care for the place it belongs to?
How does it contribute to the local community, economy, and ecology? Is it honest about what it can and can’t do?

The term “sustainable hotel” may have brought us this far but to truly go forward, we need a more inclusive, humble, and community-rooted approach.

Let’s stop looking for perfection and start supporting progress.