Radisson’s first two net-zero hotels, both in Europe, were verified across all three scopes. It’s harder than it sounds.
Most hotel sustainability certifications cover the things guests can see: the card asking you to hang up your towel, the absence of single-use plastic bottles, the LED bulbs in the bathroom, a solar panel on the roof. These are Scope 1 and Scope 2 reductions — direct emissions, and emissions from purchased electricity. They are real, and they are measurable, and they are also not where most of a hotel’s carbon footprint lives.
Scope 3 is everything else. In a hotel, that means the food sourced for the restaurant and the emissions generated in producing it; the laundry sent out to a commercial facility and brought back in a diesel truck; the amenities manufactured in one country, shipped to a warehouse, and then distributed to properties across a portfolio; the waste; the business travel of employees; the guest transportation to and from the property. Scope 3 is where hospitality’s actual environmental cost is concentrated, and it is the category almost no hotel certification program requires brands to address, because the data is genuinely difficult to gather, the supply chains are genuinely hard to control, and the resulting number — if calculated honestly — can be uncomfortable.
Radisson Hotel Group’s 2025 Responsible Business Report, released this month, confirmed that the Radisson RED Manchester City Centre and the Radisson RED Oslo City Centre have been verified as net zero across all three scopes. The verification was conducted by TÜV Rheinland, against the Net Zero Methodology for Hotels — an internationally recognized framework — and covers the full operational footprint: Scope 1 and 2 emissions reduced to near-zero through electrification and renewable energy, and Scope 3 reduced across food and beverage sourcing, waste, laundry, amenities, and transportation, with the remaining footprint addressed through nature-based solutions. Both properties completed their transitions in 2025 — Manchester in May, Oslo in July — making them, according to the group, the first hotels of a major international chain to reach this standard.
The broader portfolio numbers are, on their own, reasonably significant: a 23 percent reduction in emissions intensity per square meter versus Radisson’s 2019 baseline, and a six percent reduction in total Scope 1 and 2 emissions over the same period, while the portfolio itself grew by 20 percent. Seventy-eight properties now operate on 100 percent renewable electricity. The group’s target is 100 Verified Net Zero properties by 2030, using a technology-driven retrofit model designed to scale the approach beyond new builds. In March, the group published a methodology document laying out how existing hotels can be adapted rather than replaced.
The hospitality certification landscape has been expanding quickly enough that individual milestones can blur together. Accor has certified 50 percent of its portfolio by eco-standard, more than tripling that figure in a single year. Booking.com lists 28,000 properties with third-party sustainability certifications, up 22 percent year over year. Small Luxury Hotels of the World rolled out minimum sustainability standards across its 650-plus properties. The sheer volume of announcements has made it difficult for travelers to calibrate what any given certification actually requires — and most don’t require scope 3 accounting.
What distinguishes the Radisson program is not the ambition but the methodology. TÜV Rheinland is an industrial testing and certification organization, not a hospitality trade body — it does not have a commercial incentive to certify generously. The Net Zero Methodology for Hotels aligns with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s scope definitions, which are the closest thing the corporate sustainability world has to a shared accounting standard. A hotel that has had its supply chain and food and beverage emissions independently verified under that framework has cleared a higher bar than one that has received a star from a green hotel rating system with its own criteria.
That said, two hotels is two hotels. The question the 2030 target raises is whether the methodology holds as it scales from a pilot in two progressive Northern European cities to a hundred properties across different markets, infrastructure contexts, and supply chains. The Manchester and Oslo certifications are meaningful proof that the standard is achievable. Whether it travels is something the next 98 properties will answer.
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