Europe's Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive — EmpCo — took effect Sunday, and it applies to any company marketing to EU consumers, including those headquartered outside the bloc. For hotel and airline sustainability chiefs, the immediate operational consequence is a shakeout among eco-labels: labels that cannot demonstrate third-party-verified certification or a public authority standard will no longer support marketing claims in Europe.

The directive bans vague and generic environmental wording such as "eco-friendly," "green," "climate friendly" and "carbon neutral" when the claim rests on offsetting. It also mandates that companies making claims about future climate goals lay out plans for meeting them. The rules extend to comparison tools and eco-labels on hotels, and they cover environmental claims made to European consumers regardless of where the seller is based.

Sustainability executives across the travel sector welcomed the enforcement. Booking Holdings, Hilton, Trip.com and Abra Group all expressed support for the law, saying it brings greater transparency and consistency to claims that have long varied widely in rigor.

They also expect the number of hotel eco-labels to shrink. Existing programs measure different things, and many will fail the higher bar EmpCo sets. The European Commission has cited four labels as compliant: Nordic Swan, Blue Angel, the Austrian Ecolabel and the Dutch Ecolabel. Green Key, one of the most widely used hotel certification programs, has switched to an audit-based accreditation process and has asked certified hotels to review their claims.

The industry has already felt this regulatory pressure. Booking.com shut down its Travel Sustainable program in 2024 after the Dutch consumer regulator called it possibly misleading.

Hilton says its LightStay data platform keeps the company comfortable under the new regime, though the chain acknowledges that internal data alone cannot support a marketing claim at an individual hotel property.

Aviation faces a related problem with the term "sustainable aviation fuel." Abra Group says carriers will respond by describing lifecycle emissions reductions and production pathways rather than making broad sustainability claims about the fuel itself.

The open question for operators is consolidation: with enforcement live and a much stricter evidentiary bar for labels, hotel groups selling into the EU will likely consolidate their certification programs around the handful of schemes that survive scrutiny.