Mass tourism destinations and facilities, accounting for the most significant share of the global tourism market, are still largely managed with little or no environmental concern. The willingness and ability of facility management and staff to adopt greater environmental awareness and responsibility is crucial in striving towards a higher degree of sustainability in the tourism sector. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the environmental proactiveness and ground-breaking work that has been carried out within the Scandic hotel chain over the past decade. This is an account of how environmental responsibility can become a top corporate priority and lead to significantly decreased environmental impacts, excellent economic performance, and a considerably upgraded environmental image.
Literature and experience show that there are large discrepancies between the calculated and measured building energy usages, where user-related parameters are significant factors with regard to energy use in low-energy buildings. Furthermore, the difficulties encountered when quantifying these parameters compound these discrepancies. The main aim of this study was to provide feedback that would help the building industry and research communities to predict more accurately the impact of the user-related parameters on energy performance. The results of the study would, subsequently, contribute to minimizing the discrepancies between calculated and measured energy use. This article analyses simulated building energy use based on randomly chosen combinations of measured user-related parameters in three recently built low-energy schools in Sweden. The results show that energy performance can span from 30 to 160 kWh/(m² y) simply by varying the combination of previously measured user-related parameters in building energy simulations. The study shows that the set points for indoor air temperatures during the heating season and the energy required to run a demand-controlled ventilation system have an extensive influence, while tenant electricity use has a slightly lower influence on building energy use. Variations in occupancy rates and energy for hot water usage have the smallest influences on building energy use.
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