easyHotel has announced a £4.5 million investment for 12 UK locations to further reduce the group’s carbon footprint as part of its strategy to be the first choice for low-carbon affordable hotels in Europe.
The investment will be spent on improving hotel energy efficiency with the installation of heat pumps, solar panels, improved metering, control systems and new more efficient air conditioning systems. Following the work, CO2 emissions are expected to fall by 45% by 2025 across all the UK hotels.
In addition to the upgrades, single use plastic bottles have been removed from all owned and leased hotels with free filtered water fountains installed for guests to refill their own bottles or buy a reusable bottle from reception. Going too are plastic key cards, with wooden key cards currently being rolled out across the owned and leased network. The wooden cards are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council as coming from sustainably managed forests. It is expected that the wooden key cards will prevent 55,000 plastic key cards from being produced in 2023.
Karim Malak, CEO of easyHotel, commented: “The hotel industry accounts for about one percent of carbon emissions globally, and we have a collective responsibility to do all we can to reduce these emissions. Our business is naturally low-carbon thanks to our size-efficient room design which uses less raw materials, but it’s important for us to look at every area of our operations and try where we can, to be as low-carbon as possible. Our no frills, easy, experience means we don’t provide unnecessary items that end up in landfill or waste power on often unused elements of a hotel such as gyms and restaurants. The energy that we do consume is set to become even more efficient due to this investment and we’re proud to be offering low-carbon alternatives which in turn, enables us to pass on savings to our guests too.”
The UK locations benefiting from the investment £4.5m investment are London Shoreditch, Croydon, Birmingham Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Milton Keynes, Ipswich, Cardiff, Newcastle and Glasgow. The hotels will remain open whilst the work is completed. By the end of the year, easyHotel is set to announce similar low-carbon investments for its hotels in Belgium, France, Netherlands and Spain.
