Environmental certification in tourism and hospitality: Progress, process and prospects

Abstract

Attempts to promoting sustainable tourism and ecotourism as quality products suffer from the lack of methods to ensure these are not just a green wash. The current proliferation of awards, labels and endorsements has confused consumers to the extent of preferring to ignore these green messages. Several initiatives have emerged to address the proliferation of small, little known, limited value ecolabels in tourism and hospitality, and to ensure that the larger ones meet internationally accepted criteria. This paper will review progress made by a wide range of public, private and non-profit agencies in developing environmental standards and method to measure them, which will be set against the internationally agreed process for compliance assessment. From the above experiences, the author will outline the prospects to environmental certification in tourism and hospitality, which are the development of an international accreditation system, following agreed standards, and linked to national, regional or sector-specific certification programmes. © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.