The Lower Emissions Hotel Room: A consumer-driven and greenwashing-alert approach to making tourism more environmentally sustainable

The tourism industry is not environmentally sustainable. It generates 8.8 % of all global carbon emissions and the emissions from tourism continue to increase by 3.5 % per annum (Sun et al., 2024). Importantly, technological innovation cannot keep up with tourism growth, reducing tourism emissions by only 0.3 % per annum (Sun et al., 2024).What, then, can we do to make the tourism industry more environmentally sustainable? Most approaches are complicated or have uncertain outcomes. Biofuels are in short supply (Ansell, 2023; Scott et al., 2010) and still generate a substantial amount of emissions (Ansell, 2023). Environmental certification schemes have been around for decades (Buckley, 2002) and are more in demand than ever, but do they contribute enough to have a material impact? After all, consumers pay little attention to whether tourism providers are eco- certified or not (Can et al., 2023; Chi et al., 2022), yet it is growing consumer demand that drives emissions.How can we activate consumers to contribute to improving the environmental sustainability of tourism? How can we empower tourists to make sustainable choices and, in so doing, force the tourism industry to improve its environmental performance?This Viewpoint puts forward a simple idea: Lower Emissions versions of tourism services. Lower Emissions versions can be launched by tourism businesses themselves and should be slightly cheaper because the costs associated with offering them are lower. For example, compared to a normal hotel room, a Lower Emissions Hotel Room could provide no single-use cosmetics, no single-use slippers, no minifridge, no daily hotel room cleaning, no daily replacement of towels and the air conditioning may be limited to a range of 18 to 21 degrees Celsius.