How it works
How Hotel IMPT works
The visible part is a hotel search. The interesting part is the automatic 1-tonne carbon retirement that runs behind every booking. Here's the full mechanic.
The basic mechanic
You search a destination on Hotel IMPT, pick a property, confirm the booking and pay. That's the visible part. The carbon-retirement runs automatically behind the scenes — within minutes of confirmation we retire one verified tonne of CO₂ on a public registry (Verra or Gold Standard), record the retirement on-chain against your booking ID, and surface the retirement reference in your confirmation email.
There is no separate carbon checkbox, no upsell, no 'climate-friendly room' tier. The offset is included in the booking price and applies identically across every room type, every city, every guest count, and every nightly rate.
Where the credits come from
Our held inventory is sourced from project developers listed on Verra (the VCS programme) and the Gold Standard. We default-weight toward removal-track methodologies — primarily biochar (Verra VCS-2700 family) and mangrove restoration (Gold Standard 11000 family) — because removal tonnes don't depend on counterfactual reasoning to be real. Avoidance credits sit in the mix only when the additionality argument survives third-party scrutiny.
We do not buy compliance-market credits (EU ETS allowances and equivalent regional schemes). Those are designed for regulated emitters, not for travel offsetting, and using them would be economically irrational at €70-100 per tonne.
How the on-chain record works
Every retirement generates a smart-contract transaction 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 publicly queryable — anyone can inspect it, and it makes any IMPT-side double-claim mathematically impossible.
Your confirmation email includes the transaction hash. Click it and you'll see the on-chain record. Click through to the registry URL and you'll see your booking ID listed as the beneficiary on the underlying retirement.
Why one tonne
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 comfortably above the carbon footprint of a typical multi-night hotel stay — a 4-night urban stay emits 100-180 kg of CO₂, so 1 tonne covers it with 5-10× headroom. Third, one tonne is psychologically legible — round, verifiable, and free of arithmetic at checkout.
What this doesn't cover
We're explicit about the boundary. A long-haul return flight emits 1.5-2 tonnes by itself — more than the hotel offset retires. We do not pretend a hotel-booking retirement neutralises a flight. It does not. If you also want your flight covered, the right answer is a dedicated flight offset, purchased per kilometre flown and retired separately.
Ground transport, restaurant meals, on-site activities — all of these are outside the booking offset's scope. The retirement covers the hotel-stay slice of your travel emission. It's a specific, defensible slice, not a blanket 'carbon neutral trip' claim.
What you can verify
Three things, all from your confirmation email. The registry retirement record (Verra or Gold Standard URL), the on-chain transaction hash, and the project ID. Each of those independently confirms that a real tonne of CO₂ was retired against your booking. If any of the three are missing or don't resolve, that's a bug — email support@impt.io and we'll fix it.