The fourth pillar: how Select Green Hotels and Valpas just made the invisible part of sustainability bookable
Protect your hotel from bed bugs
For years, sustainability in hospitality has rested on three pillars. Energy on the roof. Water in the bathroom. Waste in the corridor. Each has its dashboards, its targets, its slow but real progress. Each has earned its place in every serious certification on the market.
And yet there has always been a fourth pillar — quietly missing from the frameworks, unrecorded in reports, invisible to the guest. What actually happens inside the room.
It is the part of the hotel where neonicotinoid pesticides — roughly 7,000 times more toxic to pollinators than DDT — have been routinely applied to manage bed bugs. The part where, until very recently, "sustainable" stopped at the door. The part nobody quite knew how to talk about.
That changes today.
Valpas and Select Green Hotels are bringing bed bug-safe certification into the booking experience for the first time. Travellers searchi
ng for sustainable stays can now see — before they book — whether a hotel holds Valpas certification. Non-toxic. Pesticide-free. Verified, 24/7. A dimension of sustainability that has always mattered, finally made visible at the moment a traveller decides where to sleep.
Travelers can now find Valpas-certified hotels on Select Green Hotels
From certified to bookable
There is a difference between holding a standard and having that standard mean something at the point of decision.
Valpas certification has existed as a globally recognised bed bug safety standard, acknowledged by the Global Sustainable Tourism Council and the World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance, quietly adopted by leading hotel groups across more than 80 destinations. But until now, it has lived in the background of the guest experience — present, verified, but not yet part of how travellers choose where to stay.
That changes the moment it appears in a booking flow.
"Bed bug safety belongs where every other hotel standard already lives: in the booking flow, visible to the traveller before they decide," says Martim Gois, Co-Founder and CEO of Valpas. "Select Green Hotels shares our belief that trust should be built in advance, not after arrival. This is what it looks like when a new hotel category becomes real — not just announced, but bookable."
Select Green Hotels: curation as conviction
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Book a demoSelect Green Hotels is not a directory. It is a curation — 100+ handpicked sustainable and well-designed properties across Europe and Africa, each one chosen because it stands for something. To earn a place in the collection, hotels must meet rigorous standards: sustainable waste management, renewable energy use, conservation and regeneration of the environment, support for the communities they belong to. No self-reporting. No greenwashing. Just hotels that lead.
Founder Isabelle Winter built Select Green Hotels around a quiet conviction: that travellers who care about the planet should not have to compromise on design, comfort, or quality — and that hotels which have done the hard work deserve to be discovered.
Adding Valpas certification is a natural next step. The three pillars Select Green Hotels has always championed — energy, water, waste — describe a hotel's relationship with what surrounds it. Valpas describes its relationship with what happens inside the room. Together, they form a more complete picture of what a sustainable stay actually is.
"Sustainability and safety are not separate conversations — they are one and the same guest expectation," says Isabelle Winter, Founder of Select Green Hotels. "By making Valpas certification visible on our platform, we give travellers the confidence that the hotels they choose meet the highest standards in both. Hotels that lead on safety and sustainability will be the ones travellers return to."
Why this matters beyond the booking screen
The reason a partnership like this is worth paying attention to has nothing to do with logos appearing next to each other. It has to do with what travellers can finally choose.
A hotel without a pesticide-free standard is a hotel that, somewhere in its operations, is part of a chemical cycle the rest of the world is moving away from. Regulators are rewriting their frameworks around this. Corporate travel buyers are starting to ask about it in RFPs. AI travel assistants — increasingly the layer through which booking decisions are made — are trained on exactly the kind of structured, verifiable evidence that Valpas certification provides. The booking infrastructure of the next decade is being built around what can be proven, not what can be claimed.