Building a sustainable future for travel

There’s a lot to consider when it comes to booking travel: price, health and safety, environmental impact and more. Last year, we shared travel tools to help you find health and safety information. Now we want to make it easier for you to find sustainable options while traveling — no matter what you’re doing or where you’re going.  

To make that happen, we’ve created a new team of engineers, designers and researchers focused solely on travel sustainability. Already, this team is working to highlight sustainable options within our travel tools that people use every day. 

Beginning this week, when you search for hotels on Google, you’ll see information about their sustainability efforts. Hotels that are certified for meeting high standards of sustainability from certain independent organizations, like Green Key or EarthCheck, will have an eco-certified badge next to their name. Want to dive into a hotel’s specific sustainability practices? Click on the “About” tab to see a list of what they’re doing — from waste reduction efforts and sustainably sourced materials to energy efficiency and water conservation measures.

We’re working with hotels around the world, including independent hotels and chains such as Hilton and Accor, to gather this information and make it easily accessible. If you’re a hotel owner with eco-certifications or sustainability practices you want to share with travelers, simply sign in to Google My Business to add the attributes to your Business Profile or contact Google My Business support. 

Making travel more sustainable isn’t something we can do alone, which is why we’re also joining the global Travalyst coalition. As part of this group, we’ll help develop a standardized way to calculate carbon emissions for air travel. This free, open impact model will provide an industry framework to estimate emissions for a given flight and share that information with potential travelers. We’ll also contribute to the coalition’s sustainability standards for accommodations and work to align our new hotel features with these broader efforts.