Smart Hospitality: Understanding the ‘Green’ Challenges of Hotels and How IoT-Based Sustainable Development Could be the Answer

As the world takes urgent action to combat climate change, going green has now become a necessity for many areas of society, particularly the hotel hospitality sector. Without a doubt, future hotel experiences will need to have minimal impact on their environments, and this involves everyone from the housekeeper to the customer to the hotel director. However, the challenge of adopting a greener approach to hospitality is not as easy as it seems. Hotel staff, customers and management need to be supported in how to enhance/change their behaviours and day-to-day tasks/activities to ensure that they lessen the negative effect of their carbon footprint. Cutting-edge smart Internet of Things (IoT) sensors are currently being used by many hotels to track and monitor hotel operations and consumption. But this is only one side of the coin. In order for hotels to effectively go green, they need full buy-in from both their staff and customers. The authors of the paper fully advocate that the IoT technology implemented needs to effectively enable the hotel staff and customers with the ability and desire to adopt and cope with the act of ‘greening’/new ‘green’ practice. This paper discusses a study that probes in detail hotel housekeepers day-to-day activities in order to gain a more in-depth insight into their green needs. In detail it shows that hospitality staff are willing to be part of their hotel’s green initiatives. However, it has also shown that many of their attempted green practices are unsupported and left to estimates.