Study Claims Airbnb Guests Consume 63 Percent Less Energy Than Hotel-Goers

You could fill 1,370 Olympic-sized pools with the amount of water that guests save by staying at an Airbnb property instead of a hotel over the course of a year. That’s just one of the sustainability benefits that Airbnb touts in a recent study on the environmental impacts of home sharing.

Partnering with market-research firm Cleantech Group, Airbnb examined 8,000 survey responses submitted between February and April of this year from its hosts and guests. The company then drew environmental comparisons between its properties and “some of the most sustainable and energy-efficient hotels.”

The findings suggest that Airbnb’s customers are saving the planet by shunning hotel rooms in favor of the company’s network of residences. “We have always believed that the Airbnb community supports environmental sustainability around the world, and it’s truly amazing to see that the impact is even bigger than we could have imagined,” Joe Gebbia, Airbnb’s chief product officer and co-founder said in a press release.

Here are some of the study’s highlights:

• North American Airbnb guests consume 63 percent less energy than their hotel counterparts per guest per night, while European Airbnb guests consume 78 percent less. Combined, that’s equivalent to the amount of energy put out by 87,000 homes worldwide in 2013.
• It would take 233,000 cars one year to produce the amount greenhouse-gas emissions avoided by guests who choose Airbnb homes over hotels.
• In North America, Airbnb guests produce 32 percent less waste than those who stay in hotels.

In a chicken-and-egg scenario, it’s unclear what portion of Airbnb’s environmental benefits results from factors inherently related to rooms themselves as opposed to personality traits of travelers and hosts. This is due to the fact that Airbnb hosts and guests tend to be more environmentally aware, as the findings also indicate. For example:

• Whereas 52 percent of all North American homes have at least one energy-efficient appliance, that number jumps to 83 percent among Airbnb hosts.
• Almost every Airbnb host offers recycling options — 95 percent in North America and 89 percent in Europe.
• Less than half of Airbnb hosts provide the type of single-use toiletries commonly found in hotels.
• Airbnb guests, by living like locals, are 10 to 15 percent more likely to use public transportation, walk or bicycle as a primary mode of transportation than if they had stayed at a hotel.
• Most Airbnb hosts — 82 percent in North America and 72 percent in Europe — use at least one “green” or “sustainable” cleaning product.

The press release from Airbnb further details the study’s findings and quotes Jonathan Tourtellot, the founding director of the National Geographic Center for Sustainable Destinations. “These findings suggest that Airbnb, by the very nature of its business, has raised the bar in sustainable tourism to a level that the conventional travel industry will find hard to beat.”

All this comes at a time when Airbnb faces increased scrutiny worldwide, as local governments complain that hosts violate regulations by renting out their homes and the company fails to charge occupancy taxes.

[Photo: Airbnb]