Appraising the compatibility of coastal hotels for carbon conscious tourists: a focus on shared spaces of hotels in Galle

Abstract

Due to the intensified global green house gas emissions,specially from the tourism sector has now highlighted the demand for accommodations which have aligned with carbon conscious travel (CCT) preferences. This study therefore embarks on evaluating the compatibility of coastal hostels in Galle, Sri Lanka for the carbon conscious tourists and the commitment of shared spaces in these hotels when it comes to low operational energy. Forming an integrated framework combining carbon management hierarchy (CMH) principles with carbon trading concepts and passive -active architectural strategies, this research develops a three part assessment criterion, which is Tradable Active Additionality (TAA), Tradable Passive Additionality (TPA) and carbon conscious travel/user (CCT/CC-user)behaviour. Selecting six accommodation establishments as case studies for three categories through global customer reviews using qualitative sampling and further by in site observations, interviews , questionnaires and marked through a scorecard. These gathered data represents smaller scale establishments are more prone to passive architectural performances, micro climatic responses and user centralizes energy consumption behaviour. This do make these establishments more suitable for carbon conscious travelers and also specifically sorted by them.While smaller scale establishments perform like that the larger scale chain hotels relies more heavily on active systems and shows potential on TAA but inefficiencies in those systems were also noted. The study concludes as the passive architectural strategies seems to be more effective in lowering operational energy while TAA systems offer an longer term carbon trading (CT) readiness. Even the option of CT is available for the establishments the amount of awareness and use of this programme seems to be low to none. This proposed assessment framework enables a holistic strategical tool to identify,assess, low carbon improvement potential in costal hotels and pave a pathway towards an island with future advancements like CT and low operational energy built environments.