Sustainable Hotel Building Local Assessment Model: A Case of Northern Cyprus

Abstract

Sustainable building design has grown in importance over the past three decades on every scale, from the global to the small, and in every industry, including the building and tourist sectors. While there are many different types of hotel buildings around the world to meet the demands of guests, their diverse existence can also benefit the local environment and communities through sustainable building design. Hotel buildings have the potential to influence and inspire global transmission of sustainable building methods and their advantages since they are built to attract guests and are reflective of the local culture. Thus, this research aims to build a model to assess the sustainability of hotel buildings as a flexible model according to the different regions’ conditions and priorities. The primary method used in this study is to synthesize sustainable building evaluation criteria and various other sustainability measurement methods developed for buildings. The outcome of this model can be used to assess hotel buildings at the early stages of design, new construction, and amid existing building’s renovations. This study further suggested adapting the model according to the local requirements and goals of a selected region after designing the assessment model as a globally applicable one. A mixed-method approach utilizing both qualitative and quantitative data methods was used in this article. The qualitative method was developed based on observation and interviews with different stakeholders, and the LEED certification was used as a platform for the quantitative method. With the assessment parameters model in mind, a localized version of the model was applied to one hotel building as a case study. Results indicate that the hotel building should be assessed using a localized rather than a global model to have a more sustainable hotel building in the selected area. The selected hotel was tested with the developed LEED model and the results show that the hotel, as an independent building, could be more sustainable in terms of environmental sustainability but that when the social and cultural indicators were applied from the localized model, the results indicate that the hotel would not be sustainable. Finally, this study revealed that the localized model could work over all the countries by considering each region’s existing conditions. Subsequently, this model may help the tourism sector and hotel industries in selected contexts to benefit from sustainability in terms of environmental, socio-cultural, and economic aspects. In turn, these improvements help the local people in numerous ways to have a better quality of life.