How it works
A score you can take apart.
Most sustainability scores arrive as a number with nothing behind it. This page is the opposite: every stage of ours is set out here, from the wording of a question to the arithmetic that turns 45 answers into one figure out of 100 — and to the reason that figure will still be reproducible in three years.
This assessment is designed to help benchmark sustainability practices and prepare for recognised sustainability frameworks. It does not constitute certification.
01The diagnostic
45 questions, answered on a scale with the wording spelled out.
You describe the property first — size, star rating, era, and whether there is a pool, a spa or a restaurant. Questions that cannot apply to your property are never asked, and follow-up questions only appear once an earlier answer makes them relevant. There is no login and nothing to pay.
That total is the full question bank — a property with no pool, spa or restaurant answers noticeably fewer than 45, because the questions those add are skipped entirely rather than shown as not applicable.
Every answer
A real question from the bank · GOV-01
Do you have a formal sustainability policy?
A written policy sets expectations for staff and management. It is the starting point every certification scheme looks for.
- Public, approved, and reviewed annually.
- Approved internally and reviewed annually.
- Exists but is not consistently reviewed.
- Draft or informal policy only.
- Verbal intent only.
- No policy.
Not Applicable is a seventh option on every question. It is excluded from the score entirely rather than counted as a zero.
—What gets measured
8 impact areas, weighted by how much they matter to a hotel.
The percentage on each card is the share of your overall score that area carries, and they total 100 — a bigger number means moving that area's score changes your overall score by more. Energy at 19% moving from 40% to 80% shifts your overall score 4.8× as much as Biodiversity & community at 4% making the exact same jump.
Question bank 2026.3, scoring ruleset 2026.3 — see why these are versioned below.
- 10%
Governance & policy
Policy, accountability, targets and data collection — the management foundation.
- 19%
Energy
Consumption monitoring, efficiency measures, renewable sourcing and plant maintenance.
- 10%
Carbon & emissions
Emissions measurement, reduction targets and travel or offset initiatives.
- 14%
Water
Consumption monitoring, efficient fixtures, reuse and guest linen programmes.
- 19%
Waste & circularity
Separation, measurement, food waste, single-use plastics and circular partnerships.
- 10%
Procurement & supply chain
Local sourcing, supplier standards, packaging and contractual requirements.
- 14%
People, guests & community
Staff training, guest communication, community support and fair employment.
- 4%
Biodiversity & community
Habitat awareness, wildlife-friendly grounds, chemical and peat avoidance, lighting that does not disrupt nocturnal species, and support for local conservation and community projects.
02The score
Four steps, no judgement calls, no AI anywhere near it.
Each area is scored as the points you achieved over the points available on the questions you answered. That percentage is multiplied by the area’s weight, and the weighted results are added together. The result is a single number between 0 and 100, reported to one decimal place.
Maturity bands · ruleset 2026.3
The bands are deliberately not evenly spaced. Leading starts at 90 because this is a self-assessment scored from self-reported answers, and it is a label a hotel will put on its own website — so the bar for it is set where we can still stand behind it when it is quoted back at us.
Try it on the real engine.
Below is the actual scoring function running in your browser, with the live weights and thresholds. Move an answer and watch the number; mark an area Not Applicable and watch its weight move to the others. One answer stands in for each area here — the real diagnostic asks several questions per area and averages them before this same weighting is applied.
One answer per impact area
Governance & policy
Weight 10%
Energy
Weight 19%
Carbon & emissions
Weight 10%
Water
Weight 14%
Waste & circularity
Weight 19%
Procurement & supply chain
Weight 10%
People, guests & community
Weight 14%
Biodiversity & community
Weight 4%
Overall score
60.0
Developing
Mark an area N/A to watch its weight move to the others. Nothing is estimated or filled in on your behalf.
Computed by the same function the server uses
03The gaps
Ranked by what closing them is worth — not simply by what scored lowest.
You get the full area-by-area breakdown, your weakest areas, and a ranked list of priorities. A gap against a baseline criterion every recognised scheme expects comes first, whatever it scored, because it stands between you and readiness. After that, gaps are ordered by the points still on the table multiplied by the weight of the area they sit in. Ties are broken by the question bank’s own order, so the list is stable between runs.
Some gaps are flagged, not scored
A UK legal requirement you scored 0 or 1 on, or a baseline criterion with nothing in place at all, is named separately. A respectable overall score can still sit on top of a specific problem, and an assessor will open with it.
A flag never moves the number
These are flagged separately from your score, not deducted from it. Your score is calculated from the published weights and the same answers always produce the same number — a flag says what that number cannot.
04Keeping it
Your diagnostic follows you into an account.
The full breakdown is unlocked with an email address. If you then create an account, the diagnostic you have already completed is claimed into it — you do not answer anything twice. From that point the dashboard carries your score, your area breakdown, your trend as you reassess, and the work that comes out of it.
What happens the moment it lands
- The server reads your raw answers back out of the database and scores them itself. Nothing your browser sends is trusted as a score.
- Your answers are checked against baseline criteria, and every criterion is recorded as met, partly met or not met.
- A prioritised action plan is generated from the same answers and saved alongside the score.
05The roadmap
Gaps become 30, 60 and 90-day work, owned by a department.
Which column an action lands in is decided by how much effort it takes, not by how important it is — that is what makes the first column a list somebody can actually start this week. Order within a column is priority: baseline gaps first, then the highest-impact actions, then work one operational department can pick up before work that needs a management decision. Each action carries an owner — engineering, housekeeping, front office, procurement or management — and can be assigned and tracked as a task.
06The evidence
Documents do not raise your score. They make it defensible.
Many questions accept supporting evidence — a policy document, a meter reading, a waste transfer note, a supplier contract. Upload it against the question it supports and it is reported as a separate confidence figure: how much of your assessable evidence is actually on file. It is counted only once the stored file is confirmed to exist, so the figure cannot be inflated by an empty record.
Keeping the two numbers apart is deliberate. A score that could be raised by attaching a file would be a score about paperwork.
Sustainability score
From your answers and the published weights. Evidence never changes it.
Evidence confidence
Verified files over evidence-eligible questions. Reported alongside, never merged in.
Two numbers, two meanings
—Why you can trust the number
Three properties, and none of them require taking our word for it.
Deterministic
The scoring function is pure: no randomness, no model, no lookup that could change between two runs. The same answers produce the same number today, tomorrow and on someone else's machine.
Versioned and frozen
Every published ruleset is kept and never edited — 2026.1, 2026.2, 2026.3, 2026.4 so far. Each score records the ruleset and question bank that produced it, so an old score is recomputed against its own rules rather than today's.
Written server-side only
There is no path for a browser to write a score at all. The server re-reads the raw answers it holds and computes the figure itself, so a score cannot be fabricated by the client that submitted the answers.
—On AI
It writes commentary. It never touches the maths.
Your score, your area breakdown, your ranked gaps and your roadmap are all produced by rules. AI is used on top of those results to explain them in plain language — and if it is unavailable, the results are still there in full, because they were never generated by it in the first place.
—The limits
What this is not.
We are not a certification body. This assessment is designed to help benchmark sustainability practices and prepare for recognised sustainability frameworks. It does not constitute certification. Certification is awarded by independent assessors, and it has to be — a readiness assessment is exactly that, preparation for someone else’s judgement.
It is a self-assessment. Answers are self-reported against written anchors and are not verified at the moment they are scored. That is why evidence is tracked separately, and why the top maturity band is set where it is.
Our framework mapping is our own reading. Questions are tagged with the themes they evidence — GSTC Hotel Standard, Green Key, Hotel Sustainability Basics, ISO 14001, UK legal requirement — as an editorial judgement about subject matter. It is not produced or endorsed by any scheme, and it is not a claim that answering them satisfies a published criterion. Each scheme’s own criteria are the only authority on that, and our guides link straight to them.
Now that you know exactly how it is calculated, find out what yours is.
The diagnostic is free, takes about ten minutes, and needs no account to complete.