travel
Why every IMPT booking retires 1 tonne of CO₂
Most hotel platforms charge a 'green fee'. IMPT does the opposite — we retire one verified tonne on your behalf, automatically, on every booking. Here's why we built it that way.
The decision
Most online travel platforms charge a small 'green fee' or sell carbon offsets as an upsell at checkout. IMPT does neither. Every hotel booking automatically retires one tonne of verified CO₂ on the customer's behalf, included in the price, with no opt-out box and no upcharge.
We picked the 1-tonne anchor for three reasons. First, one tonne is the universal accounting unit of the voluntary carbon market — every credit, every methodology, every registry retirement is denominated in tonnes. Second, one tonne is conservative-positive: the average hotel night emits roughly 30 kg of CO₂, so a single tonne retirement covers about 33 nights, which means most stays are net-negative at the hotel-emission level. Third, one tonne is psychologically legible — it is round, it is verifiable, and it does not invite the customer to do arithmetic at checkout.
How the retirement actually runs
Every booking generates a job in our carbon retirement queue. The job picks an active credit batch from our held inventory — drawn from Verra and Gold Standard listed projects, currently weighted toward biochar (ID Verra VCS-2700 family) and mangrove restoration (Gold Standard 11000 family). The retirement is submitted to the underlying registry's API with the booking ID as the beneficiary reference.
The retirement transaction is then mirrored on-chain via a smart contract that records the booking ID, the registry serial range, the project ID, the vintage year, and a SHA-256 hash of the registry confirmation document. The on-chain record is queryable by anyone — booking holders, regulators, journalists, NGOs running due diligence — and ties the booking permanently to a specific retired serial.
Why on-chain matters
The voluntary carbon market has a long history of double-counting, where the same tonne is sold to multiple buyers, or where a 'retirement' is claimed without the underlying registry record actually moving. On-chain recording does not by itself prevent fraud at the registry level (the underlying tonne has to genuinely retire), but it does make any IMPT-side double-claim impossible — once a serial range is hashed against a booking ID, attempting to reuse it for a second booking writes a conflicting record on a public ledger.
It also gives the customer an audit trail. Six years from now, a guest who booked a hotel on 23 May 2026 can still pull the specific credit serial that was retired against their reservation, and look up the project's verification status on Verra at that future date. That kind of traceability is rare in voluntary markets and almost unknown in travel platforms.
Why not five tonnes, or half a tonne
Five tonnes would let us advertise 'every booking removes a year of European driving!' but it would be economically untenable across the entire IMPT booking volume, and most of those tonnes would be lower-quality avoidance credits to fit the budget. Half a tonne would not cover a typical 4-night stay's full hotel emissions and would lose the round-number legibility. One tonne sits in the only narrow band that is both economically sustainable and credibly conservative-positive against actual stay footprints.
The honest limit
A long-haul return flight emits 1.5-2 tonnes of CO₂ — more than the hotel offset we retire. We do not pretend a 1-tonne hotel retirement neutralises an intercontinental flight. It does not, and we won't claim it does. What it does is fully cover the hotel's own emission contribution and leave a surplus that pushes the stay below zero on the hotel ledger.
If you also want your flight covered, the right answer is a dedicated flight offset — purchased per kilometre flown, ideally from removal credits, and retired separately. We will eventually offer this as an opt-in at checkout for travellers who book flights through IMPT partners. For now, the booking retirement is the hotel-emission piece, and we are clear about that.
What you can verify
Every IMPT booking confirmation includes the credit serial range, the registry URL, and the on-chain retirement transaction hash. Click through and you should see a registry page showing your booking ID as the beneficiary on the retirement record. If you do not — that's a bug, and we want to know about it.
Book a hotel — one tonne of CO₂ retired automatically.
Every IMPT hotel booking retires one Verra- or Gold Standard-listed carbon credit on your behalf. No add-on fee, no upsell, no catalogue. Just verified, on-chain retirement.