Tackling the current environmental concerns won’t just need funding rather it needs the right strategy and the right organisation. Most methods of reporting CO2 figures are inaccurate for properties because CO2 consumption varies daily depending on different sources of power. It also depends on the apartment’s location, size and even the weather.
We recognise this difficulty and have introduced EcoGrade, a measure of how sustainable a stay will be in our serviced apartments. Our star ratings remove the complexity of underlying CO2 calculations because we do the maths for you.
We do accurate reporting of sustainability factors in several categories for as many territories as possible. It is a challenge because of the effort required to locate high-quality, valid data on buildings, energy suppliers, and transport systems for different regions. A challenge ignored by our competitors who choose to simply make assumptions.
We look at the efficiency of apartments based on the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC), which is conducted by a certified surveyor. We are able to connect our computers to the raw EPC data and extract a lot more information beyond the simple certificate. We also use information about the availability of green transport, be it electric cars, scooters, or underground trains. We measure the proximity of all these different options from the apartment and factor that in. We also worry about the tariffs that the energy suppliers are on and even the energy suppliers themselves to see other green tariffs.
Societal awareness regarding our impact on the environment has increased, particularly travel. Whether you’re an individual choosing an apartment, or you’re an actual corporation that has a much bigger kind of carbon footprint to worry about through all your employees travelling a lot, EcoGrade helps to provide other understandable solutions to get a better grip on what your environmental impact would be.
We made the decision to research and locate necessary data sources, negotiate access to those data sources where they are not readily available, build computer systems that connect to all the different APIs and data sources, and extract the data.
Our data scientists then go through a multi-stage validation and cleaning process, ensuring addresses are accurate, and identifying fields that contain errors or missing data.
We analyse the data in order to understand the trends.
To facilitate this analysis we also exploit our own unique data sources, gathered from our own apartments of MySquare, and from listings on TheSqua.re. We ensure our data remains up to date by having measures to refresh the datasets regularly.
Today we are exploring the use of the latest AI machine learning methods such as variational autoencoders to fill in missing data items through a process known as interpolation. Here the algorithm looks at identical apartments and learns what the missing values should be.
All of our analysis is overseen by Prof Peter Bentley, a renowned computer scientist who specialises in AI-based at University College London and who is a member of the Committee on UK Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standards.
On TheSqua.re website, users can see how an apartment is rated across four factors. These are displayed under a left icon for each factor, with a star rating between zero and five. We have made it as simple as possible for potential guests to understand the environmental impact of their stay.
We have enhanced the user experience even further for corporate clients with our cloud-based accommodation sourcing platform, TheSquare.AI. TheSquare.AI is our smarter and effortless solution for corporate accommodation and travel management, designed to allow corporate clients to set up their global travel programme their own way.
Inside your TheSquare.AI portal, there is an EcoGrade webpage. Here, you can view your monthly CO2 emissions in tonnes for each of the four factors, including the average, lowest, and highest emissions. Below, there is an easy-to-understand bar chart highlighting overall monthly CO2 emissions. This enables corporate clients to become more aware of the environmental impact of their bookings.
Ecograde is a cutting-edge feature, which is far ahead in competition and the long-term market uptake and response are still being determined. However, EcoGrade provides an answer to the current industry demand for sustainable accommodation. We believe that this feature will be key to helping customers make carbon-conscious decisions on their accommodation and travel choices.
Recently, we have had an abundance of positive feedback on EcoGrade, from corporate customers trying to minimise their own carbon footprint to entire organisations trying to carefully book accommodation with their own carbon emission goals.
Some of these include:
“Excellent data offering for the corporates to consume and refer to as a deciding factor for their accommodation options. The Travel Managers should be sensitised & make the carbon footprint one of the major criteria to choose options for their travellers”- Abhijit Sinha, Managing Director, EasyTrip India
“Well played. This is why we work with Green Tourism to understand our impact. And give a Green option for peeps”- Scotty Hodson- Green Property Investor and Innovator, CEO at SILVA Executive Short Term Lets.
One important new feature to be introduced soon will be recommendations for apartment owners. Because of the detailed analysis we perform, we can auto-generate recommendations for how EcoGrade scores can be improved. Examples of improvements might be “Switch to low energy lighting”, “Add new loft insulation”. These recommendations can be combined with links to partners who are able to assist.
We are working to expand EcoGrade globally. We started in London and quickly expanded to the rest of the United Kingdom, France, Netherlands and Spain.
Our cleaned data is a first in this domain, and our summary via EcoGrade provides the first and only summary of the data. With this resource we can show bigger analyses: we can map out which regions have more or fewer sustainable apartments.
