## 1 Introduction
In the present work we verified whether the simplified ARERA (Italian Regulatory Authority for Energy Networks and Environment) technical datasheets [51], issued for the urban residential building stock, can be easily applied to estimate the increase in energy efficiency (or the corresponding decrease in the release of polluting substances) consequent to the adoption of some improvements to a building or plant, planned for the issuance of the EU Ecolabel brand for accommodation facilities [29]. The convenience in the use of these technical datasheets lies in the fact that they allow the estimation of the energy demand reductions without necessarily going through the building simulation. For this purpose, a case study has been conducted to estimate what advantages agritourism owners could gain in adopting a well-known brand such as the EU Ecolabel [29], with particular reference to the actions aimed at saving energy and reducing emissions of pollutants, from the perspective of a possible \"nearly Zero Energy Agritourism (nZEA)\", in parallel with the previously cited nZEB and neZEH projects. The idea at the base of this work stems from the numerical consistency of agritourisms in Sicily [47] and their conceivable growth trend, which is a consequence of the increased interest in the rural landscape of the territory and in the products of the land that are strongly orienting tourism, directing it not only towards the urban context. The adoption of an environmental certificate like the EU Ecolabel [29] can therefore represent an advantage both for agritourism owners and for the entire territory. Furthermore, the owners of agritourism in Sicily can apply for subsidized loans and financial funding [28; 52] in the regional area and beyond. However, such requests must be supported by information concerning the consumption and energy efficiency of the agritourism and, in line with the new European directives on sustainability [17; 18; 19], by information on the environmental performance of the buildings themselves (premises). Normally this information is of a complex nature and tends to imply the use of sophisticated simulation models, the use of which is not always the prerogative of (or available to) the managers of the holiday farms. The same problem can be found by analyzing the work of the decision makers who have to assess the adequacy of the requests for funding. Essentially, the availability of simple but reliable tools for evaluating these premises is of paramount importance for the orientation of this important tourism sector towards a sustainable path. Hence, as previously mentioned, in order to provide a contribution to this important issue we assessed the reliability of a scheme of simple computational methods provided by the Italian Regulatory Authority for Energy Networks and Environment--ARERA [51], specifically for the residential and tertiary building stock. The advantage in the use of this computational scheme lies indeed in the fact that it is based on excel spreadsheets (technical datasheets) which, as already mentioned, allow the estimation of the energy demand reductions without the need of simulating the building behavior.