Brussels: Europe and the Arabs
To support hotels in the European Union to measure and communicate their sustainability, stakeholders have been invited to participate in a consultation to develop new rules for assessing the environmental impact of hotel accommodation services - Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR). This came in a statement issued by the European Commission headquarters in Brussels this morning, Monday, which also stated: “The consultation is open to all stakeholders, including industry representatives, environmental organizations, consumer organizations, political authorities and the general public. It will be open until midnight on 2 March 2025.

Interested stakeholders can submit their comments online. To participate, they must be logged in to the European Union. .
A webinar will be organized for more information and to answer questions on 12 February 2025, from 10:00 to 12:00 am CEST.

Once developed, this will help the EU hotel industry to be more sustainable:

Provide solid evidence to substantiate green claims, and provide credibility and trust among consumers looking for sustainable accommodation;

Facilitate fair competition by allowing companies to compare their environmental footprint based on a harmonized method;

Allow the industry to reduce efforts and costs by identifying what matters most, improving and tracking its environmental performance effectively and ultimately investing in a healthy environment;
After the consultation period, the Technical Secretariat will review PEFCR has all the comments and is making the necessary changes to complete the new rules. Based on additional input from stakeholders, the final draft is scheduled for the first half of 2026. PEFCR will then be ready for implementation in the form of PEF studies in the second half of 2026.
The project is funded by the European Union and is jointly implemented by a consortium coordinated by adelphi with Studio Fieschi & soci and maki Consulting as experts and technical officers of PEFCR. The European Hotels, Restaurants, Bars, Cafés and Similar Institutions Association in Europe, in collaboration with Studio Fieschi & soci, chairs the Technical Secretariat of the project, the governing body working on the development of PEFCR. As a multi-stakeholder working group, the Technical Secretariat represents at least 51% of the hotel market in the European Union.
PEF is a comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method for measuring the total environmental impacts of products (goods or services), including carbon footprint, water footprint and a range of other environmental impacts, oriented towards the reliability and reproducibility of the results. To achieve this goal, a set of rules specific to the product category in question (hotel accommodation in this case) must be defined, in the form of a PEFCR. This is the first time that the PEF has been applied to the tourism and services ecosystem.