Booking.com’s 2026 Travel and Sustainability Report finds travelers booked 100 million room nights at certified sustainable properties last year — and one in three travelers of every generation plans a certified stay in 2026.
One hundred million. That is how many room nights travelers booked at third-party certified sustainable properties through Booking.com in 2025 alone — and it is only the beginning of what the platform’s 11th annual Travel and Sustainability Report describes as a definitive turning point for the industry.
Drawing on responses from 32,500 travelers across 35 markets globally, alongside a supplementary survey of 3,715 accommodation providers across 18 countries, the report — Booking.com’s most comprehensive sustainability survey to date — arrives with a finding that cuts across every assumption about who leads the sustainable travel conversation. One in three travelers across every generation — Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers alike — plans to stay at a sustainability-certified property in 2026, with intent figures that are “virtually identical across all generations.” That alignment, the report concludes, is one of its most uniform findings.
For years, sustainable travel has been narrated largely as a younger generation’s project — a set of values that Gen Z and Millennials were nudging into the mainstream. The 2026 findings reframe that arc entirely. Eco-conscious travel choices are, the report states, “no longer confined to a single generation, income bracket or traveler type, but reshaping how people of all ages plan, book and experience their trips in 2026.” The 100 million room night figure confirms that this intent has already translated into behavior at a meaningful scale.
Booking.com currently lists 28,000 properties with third-party sustainability certifications — a 22 percent increase year-on-year. Those certifications are awarded by independent bodies assessing hotels and properties against defined criteria: energy efficiency, water conservation, waste management, and community impact, among others. The presence of a certification on a listing functions as a verifiable signal, distinguishing properties with documented, audited commitments from the self-declared “eco-friendly” language that still fills hotel marketing without accountability. As the report puts it, third-party certification has “crossed the threshold from trend to expectation.”
The generational surprise
The most counterintuitive finding in the report concerns the breakdown of practical eco habits by age. While 75 percent of Gen Z respondents (aged 18–28) and 71 percent of Millennials (aged 29–44) say they intend to travel more sustainably in the next 12 months, older generations are outperforming their younger counterparts on nearly every on-the-ground eco behavior. It is what the report identifies as a generational paradox — the assumption that younger travelers lead in practice, not just in stated intention, does not hold up against the data.
The 2026 report is clear that it is everyone’s trip — and everyone’s expectation. That cross-generational momentum shows up in how Booking.com has been expanding its certified property infrastructure. In the last year alone, it has added EV taxi bookings in 1,600 cities and now offers hybrid or electric car rental options across 90 countries — a move that extends its role from accommodation directory to a broader participant in low-emission travel logistics.
Avoiding crowds, choosing cooler climates
The sustainability shift extends well beyond where travelers sleep. Some 43 percent of all respondents say they plan to avoid overcrowded tourist destinations in 2026, a jump of 11 percent over the previous year. Some 42 percent plan to travel outside of peak season, and 25 percent will actively seek out destinations with cooler temperatures — choices that reflect both environmental awareness and a growing understanding of the pressure that concentrated, peak-season tourism places on the places it visits.
Those numbers represent a meaningful behavioral shift. Avoiding overtourism is not a fringe position anymore; it is the plan of nearly half of all travelers surveyed globally. The ripple effect for destinations, operators, and platform design is considerable — and Booking.com’s data gives the industry a strong quantitative basis for the conversations already underway in destinations managing visitor load, from the Azores to Kyoto.
For accommodation providers, the business case for certification has also sharpened. The 22 percent year-on-year increase in certified listings reflects an operator community that has recognized sustainability credentials as a commercial differentiator. The supplementary provider survey — conducted across 3,715 accommodation businesses in 18 countries — reinforces that certifications translate into increased platform visibility and, in turn, booking behavior.
The report arrives in the same week as the GSTC2026 Global Sustainable Tourism Conference in Phuket, the largest edition in the summit’s history, drawing delegates from more than 100 countries to advance green travel policy. The simultaneous presence of platform-scale booking data and international policy coordination suggests the industry has moved past the era of individual brand commitments and into something more structural — a travel ecosystem in which certified sustainability is now a baseline that travelers across every demographic expect.
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