Accor's global hotel estate consumes same energy as mid-sized city

The entire Accor hotel chain across the world consumes the same energy as a mid-sized city, an environmental footprint report has revealed.

The report, the first of its kind for an international hotel chain, comes ahead of Accor's new sustainable development strategy.

The study also found that Accor's main water use among its 4,200 hotels came from food preparation. The bulk of its waste comes from building and revamping hotels.

"This study has put us in a position to boost our efforts for the environment, and to focus on our main impacts and main areas for improvement," said Accor academies and sustainable development director Sophie Flak. "The impacts we gauged also have economic and financial consequences, and managing those consequences is also pivotal to our group's sustainable development."

Accor said it would deepen efforts to provide a smarter food-service chain after the report showed 86% of water consumption was used in food supply compared to just 10% in bathrooms, kitchens, sprinklers and leaks.

PricewaterhouseCoopers, which carried out the study, said it was tailored to the hotel industry's distinct features.

"This is the hospitality industry's first study spanning such a large scope and aiming so high, worldwide," said PwC's sustainable development associate, Sylvain Lambert.

"As we didn't have a model to go by, the whole goal was to adapt the lifecycle analysis method to the complexity you can expect in a hotel group running operations in 90 countries and encompassing a wide variety of brands across the budget to luxury spectrum."

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By Andy Morton

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