Expedia and Key Travel to provide carbon neutral hotel rooms

Staying in a hotel is often an excuse for us to kick off our sustainability shoes for a few days but, increasingly, hotels themselves are striving to achieve net zero status.

Key Travel – the world’s largest travel management company specialising in the humanitarian, faith, and academic sectors – has announced that it is partnering with Expedia Partner Solutions (EPS) to bring its customers a brand-new offering that will deliver carbon neutral hotel rooms.

In the new program, every time Key Travel customers book their hotels through Expedia Partner Solutions, Key Travel and EPS will pay the monetary amount of the carbon offset to Cool Effect – the San Francisco based non-profit organisation – which supports projects that reduce carbon emissions.

Cool and the gang

Cool Effect will invest the funds in the highest quality, verified carbon reduction projects around the world. The methodology for quantifying the carbon footprint of the hotel stays to be offset was developed in partnership with Greenview and is based on the Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking Index of over 20,000 hotels worldwide.

Consciousness of sustainable business travel is rising among travellers with 40% saying that sustainability is important or very important when choosing suppliers. The program aims to meet this growing demand while also furthering crucial efforts to reduce carbon emissions across the globe.

“At Expedia Partner Solutions, we know that sustainable travel options are important to offer customers. This innovation makes it simple for customers to make that choice. We are excited to be playing a direct role in offering carbon neutral hotel bookings and in doing so contributing to the development of carbon reduction projects," enthused Alfonso Paredes, Global Senior Vice President & General Manager, Expedia Partner Solutions. 

Saad Hammad, CEO of Key Travel, reflected: “Key Travel has always innovated and led the way in the specialist TMC market, making travel simple, cost-effective, safe and sustainable for people who travel to do good."

"This latest innovation, as a result of our partnership with Expedia Partner Solutions, is an exciting and important benefit for our not-for-profit customers, as it allows them to mitigate their carbon impact at no additional cost to them and enables them to travel sustainably,” he added.