Not always. Verification methods differ substantially between schemes — from a full on-site audit against published criteria, to a self-completed questionnaire that is never checked against the property itself.

The Four Layers of Hospitality Sustainability Certification

At HOLITRA, we group the certification landscape into four layers. They are not competitors to each other — they answer different questions, and a hotel may reasonably hold recognition in more than one layer at the same time.

1. Hotel and destination sustainability certification

This is what most people mean by “hotel sustainability certification”: schemes that independently verify how a hotel and its organisation are managed — from sustainability strategy and governance to energy and water management, waste, procurement, staff practices and community impact. It is not limited to day-to-day operations, even though that is the part most visible to a guest. The Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) sits at the centre of this layer, in two distinct ways that are often conflated. First, GSTC-accredited Certification Bodies (such as Control Union) can audit a hotel directly against the GSTC Hotel Standard itself — these properties appear in GSTC’s own Certified Hotel Directory and are, literally, “GSTC-Certified.” Second, GSTC separately “recognises” third-party standards owned by other organisations as content-equivalent to its own criteria — this is a different, narrower status called “GSTC-Recognized,” and, following a rules change effective 1 January 2025, it is no longer automatic or permanent: standard owners had to either pursue formal accreditation or enter a documented arrangement with a GSTC-accredited Certification Body by the end of 2024. Confirmed on GSTC’s official current list: the Austrian Ecolabel (recognised since 2018), GreenSign (since 2022) and EarthCheck kept their GSTC-Recognized status through this review. Confirmed as having lost it from 1 January 2025: Green Key and Travelife, because their owners did not pursue the newly required accreditation. The EU Ecolabel was not found on GSTC’s own list at all — it operates as an independent, EU-regulated label rather than a GSTC-Recognized one.

One further distinction is worth keeping straight, because it is easy to conflate: Recognition and Accreditation are not the same thing. “GSTC-Recognized” is a status GSTC gives to a standard — confirming that its content is equivalent to the GSTC Criteria. It says nothing, on its own, about whether the specific organisation certifying a given hotel against that standard is itself “GSTC-Accredited” — a separate, more intensive verification of the certification process and the certifying body’s competence and neutrality. A hotel can hold a certificate under a GSTC-Recognized standard issued by a certification body that is not GSTC-Accredited. For a hotel evaluating a certificate — its own or a competitor’s — both questions are worth asking, not just one.

2. Green building certification

LEED, DGNB and BREEAM certify the building itself — its energy performance, materials, water systems and resilience — independently of how it is operated day to day. This is a genuinely different question from hotel sustainability certification, and it matters specifically for hotels because so much of a property’s achievable sustainability performance is fixed at design and renovation stage. A hotel can hold an excellent hotel sustainability certification while still being constrained by an inefficient building shell; the two layers are complementary, not interchangeable. HOLITRA covers this in more depth in A Hotel Cannot Operate More Sustainably Than Its Building Allows, and will publish a dedicated comparison of LEED, DGNB and BREEAM for hotel renovation projects.

3. Corporate and supply-chain sustainability ratings

EcoVadis is the most visible example. It is not a hotel-specific certification and does not audit a property on site. It rates a company’s sustainability management system — policies, actions and results (“P-A-R”) — through a self-assessment questionnaire and supporting documents, reviewed by analysts against frameworks such as GRI, ISO 26000 and the UN Global Compact. EcoVadis scores are increasingly requested by corporate travel managers and MICE clients as a supplier-screening tool, which is why hotel groups serving those segments often pursue it — but it should not be presented to leisure guests as equivalent to an independently audited, GSTC-recognised hotel certification, because methodologically it is not.

4. Management system standards

ISO 14001 (Environmental Management Systems) and EMAS certify the process a hotel uses to manage environmental performance, built on the same Plan-Do-Check-Act logic that underpins continuous improvement more broadly. They are not tourism-specific and do not certify sustainability outcomes directly — but several GSTC-recognised schemes, including GreenSign and TourCert, are explicitly built on ISO 14001 and ISO 26000 principles. For many hotels, an ISO-aligned management system is the internal backbone that makes hotel sustainability certification easier to achieve and maintain.

A practical example: a staged path to full recognition

The Nachhaltigkeitslabel Südtirol (South Tyrol Sustainability Label) illustrates a point that is easy to miss when looking at certification as a single yes/no decision: a hotel does not need to start at the most demanding tier.

The label is structured in three progressive levels, designed against GSTC criteria. Levels 1 and 2 focus on documented commitment and measurable progress. Level 3 requires a full independent audit and a comprehensive CO2 balance calculation, and is intended as the full, internationally comparable tier — though as with any regionally facilitated label, its current formal GSTC status is worth confirming directly rather than assumed from the label’s own materials.

For a hotel with limited internal capacity, this kind of staged structure — build the internal system first, formalise and document it, then submit it to independent audit — is often a more realistic path than attempting a demanding international scheme in one step. The same logic applies even where no formal staged label exists: certification readiness work can follow the same sequence.

Why the distinction matters especially for smaller and family-run hotels

In many independently owned and family-run hotels, a large share of what a GSTC-recognised scheme actually asks for already exists in practice: long-standing supplier relationships, careful resource use, close attention to the building and to staff. What is often missing is not the practice itself, but the documentation and independent verification that turns an existing practice into a certifiable one.

This is precisely where the four-layer distinction becomes useful. A small hotel considering EcoVadis because “everyone talks about it” may be solving the wrong problem. Guests can and do see an EcoVadis badge and read it as a sustainability signal — the issue is not visibility, it is substance: EcoVadis rates a company’s supply-chain-facing management system through a questionnaire, not a specific property’s day-to-day operations through an independent audit. Certification decisions also rarely serve only one audience: guests, corporate clients, investors and destination organisations may all be looking at the same certificate for different reasons, which is exactly why what a certificate actually verifies matters more than who is likely to see it. Meanwhile, a genuinely strong operational track record that has never been through an independent audit stays invisible to guests, OTAs and destination organisations, however good it actually is.

Certification as part of a system, not a standalone stamp

Certification decisions made in isolation tend to create gaps elsewhere. A hotel that pursues operational certification without first assessing building performance may find that renovation-stage constraints limit how far operational measures alone can take the certification score. A hotel that certifies without first building a reporting structure often ends up collecting the same sustainability data twice, once for the audit and once for group reporting. And a hotel that selects a scheme reactively — because a competitor has one, or a client asked for one — without a sustainability strategy behind it, has no basis for deciding what to do once the certificate is awarded.

HOLITRA’s Hotel Certification Readiness article covers what that preparation process looks like in practice, once a hotel has decided which category of recognition — and which specific scheme — fits its situation.