The Hotel Industry: Current Situation and Its Steps Beyond Sustainability

The Mediterranean area attracts almost 20 % of the world’s tourism (over 150,000,000 tourists each year) due to its mild and pleasant climate and famous cultural heritage. Tourism-related energy studies generally focus on estimating total energy use and efficiency and comparing the energy consumption regarding various facets of tourism-related activities, mostly hotels. This chapter presents a review of EU projects and papers. There is no doubt that research on tourism and climate change has developed substantially. Recent publications have begun focusing on sustainability—specifically, how climate change will impact tourism and how destinations can be adapted. Considerable attention is also paid to tourism’s role as a contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and how these can be mitigated, due to the fact that the tourism sector has been transformed into an increasing environmentally conscious marketplace where consumers have realized the impact of the behaviors that they have paid for, which are strongly associated with environmental problems. This is the main achievement of recent years, and it certainly represents a qualitative difference in the way that the activity is conducted.