AbstractThe European Union has set ambitious targets for 2020 and even more ambitious for 2050. In order to reduce the domestic GHG emissions by 80-95% -compared to 1990 levels- till 2050, the building sector has to do its part and to pass through a deep restructure. In this frame, the hospitality industry, responsible for 2% of the world's CO2 emissions can play a crucial role contributing to the 2020 energy targets in the Member States.This paper presents the scope and rationale of the European project “Nearly Zero-Energy Hotels” (NEZEH). The NEZEH project, co-financed by the European Commission aims to reinforce businesses operating in the hospitality sector to meet the challenges of competitiveness, reduction of energy consumption and adoption of green energy technologies, providing technical support and advice to selected hotels in order to develop sustainable and feasible large scale renovations towards Near Zero Energy consumption levels. The project covers six (6) Southern European countries – Spain, Greece, Italy, Romania, Croatia and France –locally and nationally. This need becomes more urgent as European law (Energy Performance of Building Directive recast) requires that -by 2020- all new buildings will be zero energy consumption (NZEB). However, the concept of NZEB is still not well developed in most EU countries and Member States should adopt specific policies and measures to accelerate the rate of large scale refurbishments of existing buildings.