How We Measure
Precision matters more to us than a bigger headline.
Every claim on this site about measurement, financing or verification traces back to a specific method and a specific standard. This page is where we show our working.
1. A hotel measures its own footprint
Once a year, each member hotel sends us a handful of operating figures: rooms, occupied room-nights, and total energy and fuel use by source. We don't estimate or average across the collection; every hotel's footprint is its own.
2. We calculate it with HCMI
We use the Hotel Carbon Measurement Initiative (HCMI), the carbon accounting methodology developed specifically for hospitality by the International Tourism Partnership and Cornell's Center for Hospitality Research, and used industry-wide. It converts a hotel's raw energy data into a comparable per-room, per-night carbon figure, so the number reflects the property, not a generic industry average.
3. Financed projects meet a real standard
A share of every membership fee is sized to that footprint and directed into the Earth Programme's portfolio: reforestation, habitat conservation, and clean energy. Where credits are used, we require recognised, high-integrity standards: Gold Standard, and projects aligned with the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market's (ICVCM) Core Carbon Principles.
4. Verification is independent, by design
Every project we finance is checked against its standard by an accredited third-party verifier, an organisation that is neither Future Hotels nor the project developer. That independence is the point: we're not grading our own homework, and neither is whoever built the project.
Verified By Whom, Exactly
We say “verified.” Here's who does the verifying.
We try never to use the word “verified” without being able to answer this: verified by whom, against what? For the Earth Programme, that means:
The Footprint
Calculated using HCMI, a published, industry-standard methodology, not a proprietary formula we invented. Any hotel can check the maths.
The Climate Projects
Checked against Gold Standard or ICVCM-aligned Core Carbon Principles by an accredited third-party verifier, independent of both Future Hotels and the project developer.
What We'll Publish
Project names and registry IDs, as soon as there are real ones.
As the Earth Programme finances specific, named projects, we'll publish exactly which ones: the project, its registry, and the standard it's verified against, rather than describing our portfolio only in general terms. Precision now means this page grows more specific over time, not less.
