The establishment of energy benchmarks is an important project for promoting the development of building energy efficiency in China. This research focuses on the establishment of energy consumption model and energy benchmarks of five-star hotels in China. Building information and energy-related data collected from 310 five-star hotels based on a survey is treated as the sample data for developing the hotel energy model using a designer simulation tool (DeST). Instead of giving single value benchmarks, energy use intensity (EUI) intervals of five-star hotels in different climate zones of China are obtained by taking the most advantageous and disadvantageous operation conditions of hotels into consideration. The simulation results show that the EUI intervals of five-star hotels in the cold zone, hot summer/cold winter zone and hot summer/warm winter zone are respectively 100-155, 140-245 and 136-213 kWh/(m(2).a), which indicates that there are 54%, 13% and 27% of hotels' energy consumption in these climate zones higher than the upper limits of EUI intervals. The reasons why such a considerable number of hotels' energy consumptions are so large are analyzed. Then several energy-efficient upgrades including building envelop retrofit, internal and external lighting replacement and HVAC upgrades could be further identified based on the energy consumption model proposed in this study. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.