Energy Performance and Energy Efficiency Retrofitting in Existing Hotel Buildings – A Review

Tourism is one of the main sources of income in some of the countries around the world. The hotel industry has thus become one of the main industries. Hotels are one of the most energy intensive building categories and the hospitality industry contributes to 2% of the world’s CO₂ emissions. At present, new buildings can be made energy efficient even from the design stage but existing buildings consume more energy than the new ones. Building energy efficiency retrofitting techniques should be applied, based on economics, to existing buildings to reduce the high energy consumption. This paper presents a review on energy performance and energy intensive areas of some existing hotel buildings at different tourist destinations in the world. Energy retrofitting technologies should be mainly focused on these energy intensive areas. It also provides a review of common retrofitting technologies and past studies on hotel building retrofits. Finally, it discusses the barriers for retrofit projects and a market mechanism to carry out successful retrofit projects. After seeing more than 50% of energy saving in retrofitted hotels, this paper concludes that all possible retrofitting technologies should be implemented from now on and measure the energy performance both before and after retrofitting.