Business Energy for Hospitality: Hotels, B&Bs & Guesthouses

With the hospitality industry having taken a huge blow in the past year and energy prices on the rise, it’s more important than ever to be smart with your business energy plan.

Costs of running a hotel or B&B

Hospitality costs money. Guests are all smiles when they have nice linen, croissants, and escapist comforts. Yet behind that warm façade is an abundance of not only hard work but additional costs to provide:

• Round-the-clock heating, cooling, lighting, and hot water – heating alone accounts for around half of the hospitality industry’s energy bills each year
• Laundry services – including energy-guzzling dryers
• Always-on fridges and freezers
• Pool or spa filtration systems
• Food, supplies and site maintenance needs
• Staff expenses – whether you employ a full team or you’re an all-rounder host
• And the list goes on…

Energy usage in a hotel

While initiatives for guests to be conscious of their energy usage are great, switching off a side lamp is a comparatively small energy-saving action when you’re supplying a 24-hour service requiring all the costs listed above, and more.

Hotels tend to use a lot more energy than equivalent sized hostels, and certainly more than B&Bs. Individual rooms for each set of guests makes a big difference. An average hotel room is estimated to use around 50 kWh of electricity a day. This adds up.

On top of this, kitchens in your restaurants and/or bars send your energy usage up even further. Read our guide on energy usage in commercial kitchens for more information. It’s also worth keeping in mind that as a hotel, your usage may well be higher than that of a typical restaurant if you’re offering room service meals later into the night.

Energy usage in a B&B

B&Bs face different challenges to hotels when it comes to energy consumption. Unlike the hoards of staff and, generally speaking, regular influx of guests, running a B&B is often a one-man show. This means you need to be even smarter with your savings.

With just a couple of rooms, energy usage is comparatively much smaller than a hotel, though your guests will still expect the same service: you need to be prepared to offer round-the-clock heating, electricity and hot water.

Your B&B is a business, meaning you should look at business energy deals even if your guests stay in the same property as your domestic home. You’ll need a bespoke package to cater for both your domestic and business consumption.

Opportunities for cutting down energy usage in a hotel or guesthouse

Here are a few easy-to-implement changes:

• Lighting – keeping the lights on uses a lot of electricity, but just a few modifications can significantly reduce your bill. Switch to energy-saving lightbulbs around your premises and install motion sensors on lights – it’s an investment, but one with long-term benefit. Where possible, maximise natural light too and let the sun do what it does best.
• Upgrade your appliances – we’re talking washing machines, induction hobs and your boiler. If it’s more than 15 years old, it’ll be bleeding energy. Whether you’re after an industrial-sized fridge or a mini fridge, newer models are designed to be more efficient.
• Heating – an optimum bathroom temperature differs vastly from that needed in a kitchen. Be sure you have individual thermostats to reflect the differing needs of areas in your hotel or guesthouse.
• Heat retention – unless your hotel is a listed building and you can’t make the necessary renovations, invest in double glazing. Couple this with curtains and carpets (or rugs, if that better fits your décor) and your guests will be less inclined to turn their radiators on.
• Air con – the UK climate means air con is rarely a necessity in hotels and guesthouses. Look to other air purification methods to ensure good ventilation, and a few soundless fans can go a long way on summer nights.

How to find the right business energy plan for your hotel or B&B

Our cost-cutting tips are all well and good, but will be of limited use if you’re not on the right plan. We know hunting for a tariff can feel like a challenge, particularly when you’ve got a business to run. Yet with our comparison tool it’s simple, and we’ll do the leg work.

• Review your current plan – grab a cup of tea and get to know the exact detail of your current consumption. Are you using more or less energy than predicted? Being armed with accurate figures when you come to compare can massively help you find a plan that works for your business.
• Think about contract length – many hospitality energy contracts are long-term contracts. This can be beneficial in that you can lock in a decent price and not have to worry about it changing. But opting for a shorter contract usually means you’ll get first dibs on better deal when it comes to renewal. You want to find a balance between the two.

Business energy plans differ from domestic plans in two key ways. First, you need to get your gas and electricity separately, there are no dual fuel plans for businesses. Secondly, quotes will be bespoke, calculated based on various aspects of your business, from its size to its location. At Simply Switch, we partner with experienced brokers to compare plans from over 25 market-leading suppliers in order to bring you competitive quotes.