Saving Energy and reducing Energy waste for Eco Smart Short rental Holidays Home
Challenge
The users of a holiday rental property enjoy an “all included” business model. Under this system, human behaviour is often unconservative, generating a waste of resources that would otherwise be precious, relative to the cost of energy or water, and thus increasing the carbon footprint and the owner spending. This sector consists of 97 million beds in the world, accounting for 25% of the global hotel supply, and continues to grow increasing the problem and leading to accelerating the climate change.
Solution
Through a measurement system based in energy consumption sensors, a predictive algorithm and smartphone app, a recommended energy consumption budget is generated for the duration of the whole stay, according to the number and age of the tenants, as well as the weather forecast. This budget is made available to the tenants and homeowners in a challenge or gaming mode, so that they can meet expectations on a daily basis, generating alarms and educational tips as well as gratifications and compliments, depending on their behaviour with respect to the estimated budget. The energy consumption is monitored in real time and can be analysed by all users through the app. The immediate result of this supervision is a greater interest in not squandering. Once the challenge is over, the users will receive a financial bonus if they have fulfilled it, which they will be able to recover or donate to an NGO, as well as keep a good-behaviour score.
The app shall also solve other issues and situations related to holiday rental, providing the tenants with a greater comfort and a better and more professional service by the owner.
FED4SAE Support
With the support of FED4SAE we have been able to partially finance the development of the app, the measurement hardware and the kick-off of a pilot project with 10 houses in the city of Santander. At the same time, the partners of the project have provided technical and economic support, and they have opened the possibility for investors to implement this app as a standard for Eco Smart Holiday Homes.
Impact
Our challenge to achieve the greatest possible impact is to disseminate the system through prestigious NGOs such as Greenpeace and WWF, and thus raise awareness among users in order to not waste precious resources. In the same manner, the objective is to convince homeowners to invest in a system that will bring short-term economic benefits and help combat climate change. The main objective is to make this system a standard filter, similar to price or rating, according to user comments in the big management channels (AirBnB, Home Away, etc). If we were to achieve this goal, the impact would be of incredible dimensions and it would help very effectively to combat climate change.