PRESS RELEASE HOTELSTARS UNION

15.05.2019
Hotelstars Union adopted new catalogue of criteria for hotel classification

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HSU President Jens Zimmer Christensen: "The new system guarantees quality and service for the guests, transparency and security for the hotels and meets both sustainability issues and technological developments.

Helsinki, 17 May 2019. Ten years after its foundation, the Managing Board of the Hotelstars Union (HSU) met Wednesday, 15 May, for its annual spring meeting in Helsinki to discuss future strategic challenges. Delegates from the 17 Member States welcomed in particular the potential new partners from Azerbaijan, Georgia and Slovakia, who have now been granted observer status alongside France, Italy, Ireland and Poland. "We warmly welcome these new partners and are very pleased that these countries are showing great interest in our joint product of a harmonised catalogue of criteria for hotel classification", HSU President Jens Zimmer Christensen underlined after the meeting.

The revision of the common catalogue of criteria, which takes place every five to six years, determined the last working year of HSU. "We have worked very intensively on this process and have made rapid progress so that we were able to adopt the new preliminary criteria catalogue yesterday," reported the HSU President. This catalogue will now run through a thorough field testing if all requirements fulfill the expectations.
The result is an up-to date and flexible system that focuses on the function behind each criterion and not only on the hardware. It ensures quality and service for the guest, but also meets the challenging requirements of technological development and reflects the concept of sustainability. "We incentivice hotels to take voluntary initiatives such as charging stations for electric vehicles or sustainability labels and certificates. We have also taken the environmental aspects very seriously, especially with regard to waste reduction and compliance with the Single-Use Plastics Directive for instance," Jens Zimmer Christensen stressed.

The new criteria set, which has been reduced from 270 to 250 positions, will apply from 1 January 2020, with Member States having time to implement the catalogue by 1 January 2021 at the latest. "With this new classification catalogue, we have achieved our goal of simplifying the criteria and creating even more flexibility and transparency. We have opened them up to new concepts so as not to lose attractivity to the modern hotels that are emerging. But we also protect our traditional, often service-intensive hotels. We have approached this balancing act in this revision process to give our hotels - from one-star to five-star - the confidence to build on these criteria over the next five to six years," the President stressed, concluding that details of the new criteria and their scores will be published after the test phase.

Hotelstars Union

Under the patronage of HOTREC – Hospitality Europe - the hotels associations of Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Sweden and Switzerland form the Hotelstars Union, that established in 2009. The Hotelstars Union is based on a common criteria catalogue for hotel classification to provide the guests and hoteliers with transparency and security. For detailed information please visit www.hotelstars.eu.

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