Tourism

Tourism needs to be managed responsibly to create a positive cycle of impacts on local communities, culture, environment and economies. This requires responsibility and actions from tourism businesses and other stakeholders and provide plenty challenges and opportunities in the sector.

Sustainable tourism certification

Sustainable tourism certifications are designed to voluntarily assess and monitor the environmental and social impacts of tourism organizations or destinations that facilitate tourism activities. Independent competent verification of the sustainability performance of tourism business can be done by accredited certification bodies.

On site audits by a competent independent auditor will take place to make sure that the `business is compliant with many sustainability criteria. This varies from

• Social policy (i.e. human rights, fair labour, and child protection)
• Environmental impact (i.e. CO2 emissions, water, waste, biodiversity, animal welfare)
• Supply chain and procurement
• Business partners
• and more

To the consumer, these labels indicate that a baseline of generally accepted requirements for sustainable tourism is met and that the company is committed to a sustainable approach to the environment and the local community in a particular destination.

Control Union & GSTC certification

GSTC is the global standard or norm for sustainable tourism and is comparable to other frameworks like MSC or FSC. In addition, GSTC Certification is a third party audit of a tourism business to the GSTC standard. Control Union is a GSTC accredited Certification Body. GSTC Accreditation plays an important role to assure impartiality, quality, competence and credibility of the process and the certification itself.

We can offer certification against GSTC Industry standards for Hotels, & Tour Operators and Excursions & In addition, we can offer many other certification and validation programmes that hotels and tour operators might be interested in. For example, in food safety, ISO norms, social compliance, carbon calculation. For more information, go to the other pages of our scroll down menu on this page.

Audits for other Tourism certification programs:
We conduct third-party audits for other sustainable tourism certification schemes (EarthCheck, Green Destinations – Good Travel Seal, Green Globe, Green Key, Green Key Global, Travelife for tour operators)