Every portfolio, every area of expertise has its challenges in energy management. In hospitals, you have to think about patient safety and comfort. In grocery retail, there’s the food that you need to keep at a certain temperature. Hospitality has its own challenges.
Hotels, resorts, and hospitality groups operate energy-intensive buildings. There are strict comfort expectations, but also highly variable occupancy. There are also increasingly tight sustainability and reporting requirements.
Add to that rising energy prices and labour shortages, and energy performance begins to affect margins, guest experiences, and brand reputation all at once.
In such a challenging context, energy management software for hospitality needs to be much more than a monitoring tool. But there’s a problem. It needs to manage energy dynamically across dozens or hundreds of properties without compromising comfort, service quality, or operations teams.
The unique energy challenges of hospitality
Buildings in hospitality sit in an awkward middle ground. They’re more complex than standard commercial real estate, but don’t have rigid operating protocols like hospitals or grocery stores. That combination creates a very specific set of challenges.
1. High energy intensity with fluctuating demand
Hotels are among the most energy-intensive building types in the service sector. In Europe alone, they consume between 200 and 400 kWh/m²/year. The better the hotel, the higher the number, with 5-star hotels consuming around 429 kWh/m². Climate and amenities also have a say. A resort with pools, spas, and on-site laundry can exceed that range.
What makes all this even more difficult is variability. Occupancy fluctuates daily and seasonally. Sometimes this variability is easy to predict. A resort located near the beach on the Mediterranean will have higher occupancy during the summer than during the winter.
Other times, that’s nearly impossible. A hotel with conferences spaces, for instance, may get a sudden period of high occupancy even in the off season, meaning they have to provide full comfort for their guests at any time.
Energy systems must constantly adapt, but they often don’t. If there’s no continuous oversight, buildings end up operating at peak demand even during low-occupancy periods, wasting a lot of energy.
2. High energy costs
Energy represents about 3–6% of hotel operating costs. In extreme cases, like energy-intensive resorts, the numbers go up to 14–25% of operating expenses. In fact, recent studies show utilities are now often the second-largest operating cost after labour in the hospitality sector.
How can HVAC and lighting lead to such high costs? They don’t. Sure, up to 61% of hotel energy goes to HVAC. But hotels operate a lot more than that.
- Commercial kitchens and restaurants.
- Laundries running daily.
- Pools, spas, and wellness facilities.
- Elevators, conference AV systems, and extensive plug loads.
Each system has its own usage patterns, maintenance cycles, and failure modes and a small inefficiency in one area can have a real boomerang effect, especially across large portfolios.
3. Aging buildings and retrofits without disruption
Many hospitality groups operate buildings that are decades old and not exactly energy efficient. Replacing the entire system is expensive and disruptive, often requiring a long downtime period, which hotels can’t afford.
As a result, energy performance often depends on small improvements rather than major upgrades. But for those improvements to actually help, you first need visibility into where inefficiencies originate, something periodic audits conducted by most hotels rarely provide. `
4. Sustainability pressure meets operational reality
Hotels need to show credible sustainability performance to regulators, investors, corporate travel programs, and guests. Starting in 2025, hotels and resorts with HVAC capacity greater than 290 kW must have BACS. By 2029, that threshold will drop to 70 kW.
Moreover, hospitality portfolios must follow broader ESG reporting requirements. However, energy data is often scattered across properties, systems, and local teams, which makes compliance difficult.
Why traditional EMS tools fall short in hospitality
As in every other sector, in hospitality too most buildings have some form of energy monitoring. They have some meters, dashboards, and generate reports every now and then. And yet, statistics still show buildings waste 20-30% of energy. Yes, even with monitoring systems in place.
The root of the problem is how they use (or don’t use) the data. Traditional EMS:
- Focus on static consumption tracking rather than behaviour.
- Generate large volumes of alerts without operational context.
- Treat each building in isolation.
- Rely heavily on manual interpretation by specialists.
The results are really easy to foresee. Alerts get ignored during peak operational periods. Issues are often spotted and addressed only after they’re visible to guests. And systemic inefficiency remains untouched because no one has the time to see how it all connects. For large portfolios, this is not sustainable.
What to look for in energy management software for hospitality
You know you need a good EMS for hospitality, now the problem is finding one. If you look for a few key features, you’re likely to find the right fit quicker.
1. Continuous, automated energy audits
Many organizations only run periodic audits, yearly or when a regulation requires it. But these audits miss too much in buildings with fluctuating occupancy and round-the-clock operations.
A good EMS must analyse energy behaviour continuously, identify deviations as they emerge, and not weeks later when the bill arrives.
2. Comfort-aware energy intelligence
Having data isn’t the problem, that’s something we’ve already seen. Hospitality EMS should correlate consumption with indoor conditions, occupancy signals, and operational context.
Without that link, you’ll need to choose between comfort and efficiency, and that’s a trade-off that shouldn’t exist.
3. Portfolio-level visibility across diverse properties
As much as you want to learn from the experience in one of your buildings, that's not really possible. Hospitality groups rarely operate in the same way. City hotels, resorts, and conference venues all behave differently.
Software must handle this variety. It should allow for comparison and prioritization across the portfolio without needing uniform upgrades to the infrastructure.
4. Prioritization that reflects guest impact and cost
In an ideal world, you’d fix all your energy problems with a few clicks. Sadly, that’s not possible, so you need an EMS that ranks issues by their financial impact, operational, risk, and potential guest experience implications.
This shifts the situation from the traditional alert overload, where you’ll eventually ignore most alerts, to impact prioritization, where you can scale energy oversight without adding more headcount.
5. Compliance and reporting by default
Energy management software should simplify compliance, not add extra work.
Automated data trails, audit-ready reporting, and built-in support for frameworks like BACS and EPC-NR make compliance and ESG reporting a natural part of operations rather than a separate project.
How Enersee helps hospitality operators regain control
When you use energy management software that understands the realities in hospitality, your day-to-day experience changes significantly.
Enersee acts as your 24/7 Virtual Energy Manager, continuously monitoring energy behavior across hotels, resorts, and mixed-use hospitality assets. It simplifies energy management across the entire portfolio, without compromising guest experience.
Enersee can detect inefficiencies across HVAC, lighting, and hot water systems automatically. It integrates with existing BMS systems to ensure regulatory compliance. Plus, it quantifies savings potential and prioritizes actions by ROI and comfort impact.
In practice, this means fewer blind spots, faster issue resolution, and measurable reductions in wasted energy without compromising guest experience.
Written by
Anastasiia Andriiuk
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