Background Companies offering accommodation have a heavy impact on the environment. For example, a typical tourist will consume 250 litres of water, 300 kW of energy, produce 1 kg of unsorted waste, and use up 50g of chemical substances per night in a hotel. The figures vary according to climate, the size of the accommodation, services offered, technical and management standard, the purchase of "green" products, and the realisation of cost and saving potential. Examples of eco-labelled hotels or camping sites today show that consumption of natural resources and energy can be reduced by 10-40 %, often resulting in reduced costs (ECOTRANS study for WTO 2001). In Europe there are several international, national and regional monitoring and benchmarking initiatives for accommodation: ECOMMT, IHEI benchmark hotel, GG21, SHR accounting and reporting system, Groenne Noegle service, and the Ecocamping monitoring system in Baden-Wurttemberg. Although, each of these systems have some strengths, there are also considerable weaknesses with many: e.g. too expensive, too complicated, only in one language, too general, different measurement units, only for one type of accommodation, only in one country, limited numbers of users, no comparable results, etc. About 2,000 tourist accommodation providers in the EU are strongly engaged in the improvement of their environmental performance and are certified with an Eco-label or use an environmental management scheme. Many more businesses are interested both in saving money, and in reducing their environmental impacts to meet their guests' expectations on environmental performance. Only a system which has a large number of participants can sustain and make sense in the long-term. However, large numbers, especially SMEs, are reluctant to sign up to a system unless it is cheap (max. 50 euros per year), available in several languages, self-guiding, offers a national help-desk, accessible for many types of accommodation and strongly linked to eco-labels and environmental management systems. Only when there are many participants from different types of accommodation will it be possible to get reliable consumption data and benchmark the environmental impacts, resource consumption and costs of tourist accommodation in Europe. At the start of the project, none of the existing initiatives fulfilled these requirements. Objectives The TourBench project aimed to develop and establish the first ever European benchmarking and advice tool for assessing the environmental impacts and costs of all types of tourist accommodation. TourBench was intended to be a practical and easy-to-use benchmarking tool for small and medium sized tourist accommodation companies. It would be designed to be complementary to existing accounting systems. It will enable these SMEs to recognise their own environmental impact and costs per guest and compare their performance with similar enterprises on an international scale to gain knowledge about their own strengths, weaknesses and saving potentials. It would also make recommendations for immediate action, assess the perception of guests and offer advice on applying for a national eco-label for the EU Ecolabel Flower or for EMAS. For the first time in Europe, Eco-labels and environmental management certificates would have comparable and reliable data from hotels and camping sites on the consumption of water, energy, cleaning chemicals, the amount of disposal waste per overnight stay or m2. They could use the results for the definition of own consumption target levels in their management. The comparison of their eco-labelled with non eco-labelled accommodation was to confirm the usefulness of these certificates and show the potential for improvement in different countries. Tour operators, destinations, hotel or camping guide publishers would use and recommend Tourbench for the continuous improvement of the environmental performance of their products. Results The project realised the development of the TourBench system, which can be used by accommodations to assess their own environmental impacts and costs. The system enables companies to generate an individual report on the basis of the information provided. The system is well prepared, user friendly and provides direct recommendations to participating businesses. However, a comparison of systems is not yet possible as TourBench has not yet resulted in reliable benchmarks. At the time of the final report, a comparison could only be provided for a specific set of parameters related to water consumption. The final report mentions that 1,100 accounts are included in the system, of which 600 contain a dataset. However, not all datasets are actually included and maintained by businesses. The beneficiary and partners will continue efforts to attract users to the system after the end date of the project. The future of TourBench mainly depends on the willingness of businesses from the target group to use the system. One threat might be that interested enterprises may hesitate to give in their confidential data to an online system. On the other hand, the beneficiary expects that as soon as the monitoring of environmental consumption is recommended or required for certification or by tour operators, the accommodation businesses will be willing to opt for TourBench. The partners conclude that without linkage to market advantage and without clear requests from marketing partners, the quantity of voluntary participants and users will remain always very limited. Further (external) motivation will therefore be necessary. Nevertheless, the TourBench project has contributed to tourism-related objectives of EU environmental policy by raising awareness (approximately 260 dissemination measures were taken, reaching more than 130,000 tourism professionals).