Hotels are a diverse building type with high normalized energy end-use because of its focus to provide best facilities for guests. There is scope, and in many countries legislative requirements, to reduce energy consumption without compromising facilities; case-studies from tourism intensive countries could be useful for demonstrating such possibilities. This paper presents a method of deriving energy benchmarks to enable classification of hotels in Greece based on operational energy use in terms of electricity and oil. The method of classification defines clusters of hotels using the k-means algorithm controlled with the silhouette plot after applying normalization factors for the operational energy data to correct for size, operation (seasonal or annual) and climatic conditions. Ninety hotels are analysed in the sample presented in this paper; and well separated clusters are defined for the whole sample and for the sample split in hotels with annual and seasonal operation. Energy consumption varies considerably between and within clusters indicating that a range of energy consumption targets might be more suitable than single value benchmarks for this type of building. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.