Developing a Model for Sustainable Hotels in Northern Cyprus

The purpose of this work is to develop a sustainable hotel building model (SHBM) that will allow for the measurement of sustainability in determining what conditions are most ideal for hotels in Northern Cyprus. This research method is based on the synthesis of international sustainable building assessment criteria from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and the localization of these criteria in Northern Cyprus. Thus, this article proposes an SHBM, which is especially localized for Northern Cyprus that can be used for new hotel buildings’ design and construction and renovations of existing buildings as well as to measure their sustainability regarding environmental, economic and socio-cultural aspects. To serve this purpose, various methods of measurement of sustainability and green certificates (both qualitative and quantitative), global in scale were studied, which provided the basis for the development of the SHBM and local conditions of Northern Cyprus. Six hotels of differing sizes were studied in order to understand localized situation, conditions and priorities. The results of this study suggest that to have a more sustainable hotel in the aimed context, hotels of different scales (based on bed capacity and classification) must be evaluated adopting the SHBM model to achieve a better result for the sustainability of large-scale as well as small-scale hotels. In addition, this model helps the tourism industry and the hotel sector of Northern Cyprus benefit from sustainability in terms of environmental, economic and sociocultural aspects, which consequently help the local community in several ways.