The SilverDoor Carbon Calculator
Trailblazer. Game changer. Multi-award winner.
- Our Commitment & Board Statement
- Our Journey
We wanted to understand the environmental impact of our supply chain. Our clients needed to report on their Scope 3 emissions and reach net zero goals. Our operators wanted to measure and reduce the emissions produced by their properties. The serviced apartment sector needed one recognised standard for benchmarking its environmental performance against other accommodation types.
We believe travel is essential to good business - building real connections with colleagues, clients and business associates. We experience first-hand how positive corporate travel can be, but we’re committed to reducing its impact on the environment while reducing our carbon footprint and those of our supply chain. The SilverDoor Carbon Calculator uses building-level data entered by serviced apartment operators to calculate an estimate of carbon emissions produced per unit, per night. The tool enables bookers of serviced apartments to compare emissions between properties while searching our website or when receiving options from our teams – in the same way you might compare facilities, location, or nightly rates.
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11. Capturing Building-Level DataProperty Operators enter detailed property data into SilverDoor Connect, covering key factors like energy consumption, laundry processes, and air conditioning systems.
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22: Turning Numbers into Carbon InsightsOur award-winning Carbon Calculator algorithm estimates emissions per night at a specific building level and benchmarks them against hotel stays.
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33: Accurate Emissions ResultsHelping you understand & compare the environmental performance of your accommodation and choose with confidence. For properties that are yet to enter their data and receive a calculation, a location-based hotel industry average is provided instead.
As we collect more data and build a comprehensive emissions database, we’ll establish a recognised industry standard for the sustainability of serviced apartments. One consistent benchmarking standard will allow businesses with corporate accommodation programmes, operators of serviced apartments, and serviced apartment agents to compare with confidence across the industry.
We recognised the lack of carbon emissions data specifically for serviced apartments and wanted to fix it. The beauty of serviced apartments is their diversity: there’s a wide range of building types, features, facilities, and amenities to choose from around the world, meaning there’s a serviced apartment to suit every guest. This diversity is what has historically made estimating serviced apartment emissions very difficult. Our property portfolio is the largest and most inclusive on the market, so we have access to the most serviced apartment data – we knew we needed to use this data for good. The intuitive algorithm takes these variances into account to calculate carbon emissions estimates for different geographical locations, building and unit types, communal facilities, and so on.
Business
travel and corporate accommodation can form a significant part of a business’s
Scope 3 carbon footprint, but it’s hard to measure downstream emissions like
these because they’re produced by activities outside a company’s control.
With the Carbon Calculator, bookers simply search for accommodation like normal and see digestible emissions estimates displayed clearly and freely next to all properties with available data. This means sustainability can be considered in the same way as cost in buying decisions, and help businesses balance the need to travel with the need to demonstrate emission reductions.
Businesses need to be able to forecast annual spend and set financial budgets, but what about budgeting for carbon spend? Minimising the carbon cost of a business trip or relocation is fast becoming
just as important as containing costs in terms of nightly rate and trip expenditure –
our Carbon Calculator provides the data to put this into practice.
We’ve incorporated emissions into our existing analytics functionality,
so we can now report Carbon Calculator data to clients on their reservations and
analyse the carbon footprint of their entire accommodation programme.
We can demonstrate carbon savings using comparative data, helping businesses
understand their carbon spending, set carbon budgets, and reduce emissions further.
Other carbon measurement methods available in the sector can
require significant financial and time investment, so we made our Carbon
Calculator free and accessible to every operator regardless of their size or
resource.
The SilverDoor Carbon Calculator is intuitive and easy to use, supporting
serviced apartment operators to understand and improve the sustainability of
their properties. To calculate emissions, the tool only needs data that
operators already collect or is easy to find – and the SilverDoor team behind
the tool are always happy to provide a demo.
The Carbon Calculator gives serviced accommodation operators a transparent
understanding of the sustainability of their apartments, which they can use as a
starting point to make tangible improvements.
Clients increasingly tell us that they
need access to emissions data on the corporate accommodation they’re booking – a demand that will
only keep growing. Entering your property data and receiving a carbon calculation is the easiest
way to fulfil this demand, stay competitive, and grow your business.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Carbon Calculator tool free to use for SilverDoor operators?
Yes. Where our calculator is concerned, there is no cost to our supply chain in collating the data nor inputting it, aside from time. We hope that by aligning with the HCMI methodology, we will also allow clients to understand it and use it for comparison with hotels too.
There are many ways to encourage suppliers. A common method has been to encourage or mandate accreditation, such as Ecovadis, CDP and others. There are lots of positives to this process; we have undertaken such accreditation for a few different clients and through our own initiatives with great benefit to us. So, we recommend this practice too. There is an element of duplicated work and, for some accreditations, there is not insignificant cost. We chose not to go down that route because we felt the burden on smaller partners is disproportionate to the larger operators.
How will the emissions figures be shown to bookers & buyers?
On the website and booking tool property searches, the information will be displayed next to the property. Where the property partner is yet to provide the data to calculate emissions, the hotel equivalent data will be displayed. Where they have provided the dataset, that property estimate figure will be provided along with the % higher or lower than the hotel equivalent. The same applies on property profile pages, quotes to clients and booking confirmations.
Will a property’s carbon figure affect its ranking and visibility on the website?
No. The website rankings and ordering will be exactly as they were before the launch of the tool. Future phases of development will allow users to sort and filter by emissions in the same way as they can with rates and facilities, but this will be driven by the user and how they choose to present their search results.
Will you be using the results to encourage your property partners to reduce their footprint? If so, how?
You can't manage what you can't measure and, at this stage our focus is more about measuring and benchmarking in a simple and transparent way. While we're pleased that it's inspiring thought and encouraging awareness, and if that leads partners towards taking action to reduce emissions, or highlights where emissions can most likely be saved, then that's a really positive benefit.
Is it possible to run reports on the CO2E of our whole accommodation programme?
Yes. Your Account Manager can arrange bespoke reporting for you accommodation programme.
What if I wish to book accommodation in some geographical areas where industry data is not available?
Where country-level data is available, industry averages will be based on these. Where country-level data is not available, city-level data will be averaged across those locations. Where neither data set is available, using a bespoke report we can apply a broader, regional average. Contact your Account Manager for more details.