ITH's Sustainable Tourism Model: iSave Hotel platform

Conscious of the growing importance of sustainability in the hotel sector in Spain, in 2016 the Spanish Secretary of State for Tourism and the Hotel Institute of Technology of Spain (ITH) signed an agreement which allows ITH to developed and implemented its own Sustainable Tourism Model, which was created with the clear objective of bringing a series of specific actions and measures to tourist accommodations to help them achieve sustainability objectives, as well as reducing the environmental and social impact of tourism. ITH's Sustainable Tourism Mode, supported by the Spanish Secretary of State for Tourism, has even gone one step further, implementing it in the iSave Hotel platform. This platform was born with the purpose of becoming a practical and complete tool for all those hotels interested in applying sustainable measures to their businesses. This model includes variables on: - Energy efficiency - Aggregate energy purchase - Water use - Waste management - Thermal envelope systems - Accessibility - Policy and CSR…etc iSaveHotel provides, in a simple and free, valuable information to owners, managers and manner maintenance technicians of hotels and tourist establishments, as well as architects, engineers and other actors involved in the rehabilitation of this type of building. ITH has carried out national projects and events: - Dissemination days of energy efficiency. - Dissemination days of rehabilitation of tourist establishments. - Fitur (Tourism International Fair). - ITH Innovation Summit. - Newsletter. - Reports. - National media communication and dissemination. - Provide a constant and clear service of information to the sector, sharing new updates and technical support. - Promotion with ads in CEHAT’s newspaper As a consequence of the implementation of this project, we have visited and carried out studies of the facilities of approximately 190 tourist establishments throughout Spain that have requested to participate in the project and we are currently executing energy rehabilitation projects in 6 hotel establishments, both in the Iberian peninsula and in the Canary Islands. In the diagnoses carried out, very relevant conclusions have been obtained about the state of the hotels in general in terms of energy. These conclusions reveal that 73% of these hotels have deficiencies in the implementation of control and monitoring systems for their installations, 71% do not have optimized systems for pumping and driving fluids, and 57% have poor installations for channeling these fluids, which means that they lose heat and cold or lose water directly during transport throughout the building. From this point on, 44% of hotels have problems with air conditioning and 40% with heating.