Eco-friendly hotel search with WholeTravel

On TechCrunch (emphasis is mine):

The “green” incarnation of travel, called ecotourism, mandates that travelers minimize their cultural, economic, and environmental impacts as much as possible to promote sustainability. But while there are thousands of hotels worldwide that promote themselves as “green”, many of them are only partially fulfilling these requirements – they might not be wasting energy, but are paying locals at near-slave wages, or funneling money out of the local economy.

Whole Travel, a new site that launches tonight, is looking to keep these hotels honest while promoting the concept of sustainable travel. The site assigns each hotel with a score based on its environmental, cultural, and economic impacts, as well as its “customer interaction”, or how well it teaches visitors about the issues that affect their destination.

To receive a score, hotels first self-assign a rating based on how well they think they fare in each category. Whole Travel CEO Matthew Davie acknowledges that these scores will be biased, but believes that submitting a misleading score would actually hurt hotels in the long run, as readers of the site would be able to tag them as dishonest and discourage prospective customers. However, the site isn’t relying on good faith alone – it is also working with local non-profits around the world to verify rating for hotels in their regions. The site is also working with international non-profits like Sustainable Travel International, which has similar goals but is based on a “badge” system that hotels need to pay for to become accredited as Green.

The concept is nice; the execution is “classic”: full-text search, guided navigation to refine by amenities (air conditioning, golf course…) and activities (bird watching, trekking…), hotel pages where the ranking is explained.

I searched an hotel in Costa Rica, refined by golf course; the only result was the Papagayo Hiton hotel, self-rated 4 out of 5 (marked as “pending review”). But how could an hotel be green with a golf course (even in Costa Rica) ? Isn’t this hotel part of the Papagayo complex which has been a disaster in terms of ecology / sustainability (as reporting by the Lonely Planet – see this article)? This is anecdotic, but highlights the difficulty for such sites as WholeTravel to provide credible ratings. I’m curious to see how the ranking of this hotel will evolve when being reviewed by WholeTravel.

Anyway, even with a credibility to be worked on, it’s important to see start-ups investigating how to empower customers for their purchase decisions. For me, WholeTravel shares a similar concept with GoodGuide that provides health, environmental and social facts about products; or Zeer that gives nutrition facts for all food goods. I would love to see such databases of facts on products to enrich a “classic” shopping search / price comparison experience in the near future!