Having a wonderful holiday and taking care of the environment while you do it do not have to be mutually exclusive. Equally, you don't need a big hotel group to be environmentally friendly as a hotel. Increasingly, the UK's hotels, bed and breakfasts and restaurants-with-rooms are going to great lengths to make sure they are being as sustainable as possible.

Choose from an ultra-chic boutique hotel in a former Victorian warehouse in Clerkenwell with newly built areas created with timber from sustainable sources and ambitious recycling pledges, to an award-winning adult-only spa hotel, perched on the Cornish coast where they harvest rainwater, have a biomass boiler and its roof incorporates sustainable design, constructed from local sea thrift making it supremely popular with insects and butterflies. Or maybe you will enjoy the country house hotel vibe with solar thermal water heating and Solar PV for electricity and a Green Tourism gold award for their efforts.

A retreat on Exmoor where they compost vegetable waste and harvest rainwater for use in the kitchen garden, a 17th century coaching inn serving seafood caught moments from the front door are just some of the eco-friendly experiences that are available. Nest boxes in the gardens, solar panels, home grown produce, wildlife ponds, electric charge points, recycling and an acute awareness of food miles are a few of the initiatives that hotels are bringing into their daily operations to make them increasingly green.