NABERS for Hotels: What It Is and How to Actually Improve Your Rating
If you’ve spent any time around hotel operations or asset management lately, you’ve probably had someone ask about your NABERS rating. Maybe it was a corporate client’s procurement team, maybe it was your own ownership group chasing ESG targets, maybe it was a booking platform flagging sustainability credentials. Either way, it’s not going away – and it’s worth understanding properly rather than just reacting to it when someone asks.
So let’s walk through what NABERS for Hotels actually is, why it’s become such a big deal, and – more usefully – what you can actually do about it.
Table of Contents
What Is NABERS for Hotels?
NABERS (National Australian Built Environment Rating System) is a government-backed rating scheme that measures how a building performs, not how it was designed to perform on paper. For hotels specifically, that means looking at real, measured energy use, water use, and indoor environment quality, and comparing it against similar properties across the country.
You end up with a star rating – the kind of thing that’s easy for a corporate travel manager or a sustainability officer to glance at and understand, without needing to know anything about your plant room or your BMS.
That simplicity is exactly why it’s caught on. It’s an easy number to put in a tender response, an ESG report, or a booking platform’s sustainability filter.
Why Hoteliers Are Paying Attention
A few things have converged here at once:
- Corporate travel and MICE bookings increasingly ask for sustainability credentials as standard, and NABERS is the benchmark most Australian corporates recognise.
- Ownership groups and REITs are under their own ESG reporting pressure, and a property’s NABERS rating rolls straight up into portfolio-level reporting.
- Guests are paying more attention, even if it’s not always the deciding factor – a strong rating is one more thing in your favour when someone’s comparing properties.
- Operating costs matter more than ever, and the same things that improve your NABERS rating tend to be the same things that bring your energy and water bills down. It’s rare that a compliance metric and a cost-saving lever line up this neatly.
- It’s showing up where guests actually book. NABERS ratings are now appearing on Google Travel, with other booking platforms expected to follow – so this isn’t just a back-office metric anymore, it’s becoming visible at the point of sale.
- Government policy is already moving. Australian Government employees are now required to consider a hotel’s NABERS Energy rating when booking accommodation, as part of the federal Net Zero in Government Operations Strategy. If you’re chasing government or corporate travel bookings, this is no longer optional context – it’s a real filter some travellers are required to apply.
Is NABERS Going to Become Mandatory for Hotels?
Short answer: it’s heading that way, and the smart operators aren’t waiting to find out for sure.
NABERS has flagged that minimum performance standards for rated hotels are likely to be introduced around 2026-27. Beyond that, mandatory NABERS ratings for hotels are being considered as part of a possible expansion of the national Commercial Building Disclosure program – the same kind of scheme that already makes energy ratings compulsory for large office buildings when they’re sold or leased. A government-commissioned feasibility study identified Australia’s more than 88,000 hotels, motels and serviced apartments as a top priority for exactly this kind of mandatory disclosure.
None of that means every hotel needs a rating tomorrow. But it does mean the direction of travel is pretty clear, and the operators already in the system – voluntarily, ahead of any requirement – are the ones who’ll have clean historical data, an established baseline, and runway to make improvements at their own pace rather than scrambling once it’s compulsory.
If there’s a lesson in how this has played out for office buildings, it’s that the properties still trying to get their first rating sorted after a deadline lands are having a very different experience to the ones who started early.
What Actually Affects Your Rating
NABERS for Hotels looks at a few different areas, but the two that come up most in our conversations with hotels are energy and water.
Energy covers everything from HVAC and lighting through to lifts, kitchen equipment, and back-of-house plant. Water covers guest room fixtures, laundry, kitchens, and cooling towers where relevant. There’s also an indoor environment component that looks at things like air quality and thermal comfort.
Here’s the bit that surprises a lot of people: guest rooms are often one of the biggest single contributors to a hotel’s overall energy and water footprint – bigger than most people assume when they’re picturing energy use through the lens of kitchens or plant rooms. And guest rooms are also usually empty for a good chunk of the day. HVAC running at full comfort settings in a room nobody’s in for eight hours is exactly the kind of thing a NABERS rating will catch you out on.
Which is the whole point of this page, really – because it’s also exactly the kind of thing GRMS and EMS are built to fix.
Where GRMS and EMS Fit In
Guest Room Management Systems (GRMS) and Energy Management Systems (EMS) target exactly the problem above: energy being spent on rooms nobody’s using. Occupancy-based thermostats wind HVAC back when a guest’s out and bring it back to comfort levels before they return. Lighting follows the same logic. None of this asks the guest to do anything or notice anything – the comfort’s still there when they walk back in, you’re just not paying to heat or cool an empty room for hours at a stretch.
Here’s a detail worth knowing: most GRMS and EMS platforms already generate a good chunk of the occupancy, HVAC run-time, and lighting data that a NABERS assessment draws on. If your guest rooms are already running smart controls, you’re often closer to being rating-ready than you’d think – the data’s already being produced, it’s just a question of whether it’s being captured and organised properly.
Which is where the metering and reporting side comes in – knowing where your energy and water are actually going across the whole property, not just guest rooms, and having it in a form an assessor can actually work with. That’s the role our BuildIQ platform (seeO2.com.au) plays: real-time visibility across back-of-house, common areas, and plant, pulled together with your guest room data into one clear picture. It’s useful for finding further savings on its own merits, but with a NABERS assessment – or a future mandatory rating – it’s the difference between scrambling to reconstruct 12 months of utility data from scratch, and already having it sitting there ready to hand to your assessor.
Put those two together – automation reducing the waste at the room level, and BuildIQ capturing and organising the data across the property – and you’ve got a genuinely solid, low-drama approach to lifting a NABERS rating rather than just hoping it improves, or panicking about it later.
New Build vs. Existing Property
If you’re building new, this is the easy version of the problem – you design GRMS, EMS, and metering in from day one and you’re targeting a strong rating before the first guest ever checks in.
If you’re working with an existing property, it’s a retrofit conversation, and the good news is that’s very achievable. Guest room automation and metering platforms are generally designed to work with the HVAC and building systems you’ve already got, so you’re not looking at ripping out plant or doing a full renovation to get there. It’s more a case of layering smarter control and visibility on top of what already exists.
Getting Started
If you’re not sure where your property currently sits, or what would actually move the needle for your specific building, that’s a conversation worth having before committing to anything. Every hotel’s baseline is different, and the right mix of guest room automation and metering depends on your existing systems, your property type, and what you’re actually trying to achieve – a rating for a tender, a portfolio-wide ESG target, lower bills, or simply being ready before any of this becomes compulsory rather than after.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a NABERS rating for hotels, and why does it matter?
A NABERS rating measures a hotel’s real, measured environmental performance – energy and water efficiency, plus indoor environment quality – and benchmarks it against similar properties. It matters because it’s increasingly expected in corporate travel tenders, ESG reporting, and by guests comparing sustainability credentials.
How is a hotel's NABERS rating actually calculated?
It’s based on measured utility data (energy and water use) over a set period, normalised against factors like the size and type of the property, then compared against a national benchmark to produce a star rating.
Do guest rooms really make that much difference to a NABERS rating?
Yes – guest rooms are typically one of the largest contributors to a hotel’s overall energy and water use, partly because rooms sit empty for long stretches while systems keep running at full comfort settings. It’s one of the most effective places to target improvement.
Can I improve my NABERS rating without a major renovation?
In most cases, yes. Guest room automation and energy metering systems are generally designed to integrate with existing HVAC and building infrastructure, so you can improve performance without a full retrofit or renovation.
What's the difference between improving my rating and just reducing my energy bill?
They usually go hand in hand. The same measures that reduce wasted energy – like occupancy-based HVAC and lighting control – also improve the measured performance NABERS is rating. The main difference is that a NABERS rating requires you to track and report that improvement in a specific, benchmarked way.
How long does it take to see a NABERS rating improve after making changes?
It depends on your reporting cycle and how significant the changes are, but because NABERS is based on a period of measured data, you’ll typically need at least one full reporting period of consistent lower energy and water use before it’s reflected in a new rating.
Does mySmart help hotels achieve or improve a NABERS rating directly?
We don’t issue NABERS ratings ourselves – that’s done through the official NABERS assessment process. What we do is provide the guest room automation, lighting control, and energy metering systems that reduce the energy and water use your rating is based on, and give you the data to support your reporting.
Is this only relevant for new hotel developments?
Not at all – most of the properties we work with on this are existing hotels looking to improve an already-established rating, alongside new builds designing it in from the start.
Is NABERS going to become mandatory for hotels?
It’s heading that way. NABERS has flagged minimum performance standards for rated hotels are likely by 2026-27, and mandatory ratings are being considered as part of a possible expansion of the national Commercial Building Disclosure program. Nothing’s locked in yet, but the direction is clear enough that starting early – rather than waiting for a deadline – puts you well ahead.
Do I need a separate metering system to get a NABERS rating, or does my GRMS already cover it?
Your GRMS or EMS is often already generating a lot of the occupancy and energy data an assessor will want, particularly at the guest room level. Where a platform like BuildIQ adds value is pulling that together with the rest of the property – back-of-house, common areas, plant – into one properly organised dataset, rather than you having to reconstruct 12 months of utility data from separate sources when the time comes.