Standards Development

Scope

This document describes a business maturity model in terms of sustainable tourism applicable to the organization responsible for tourism services or destinations, which wishes to:

a) Implement measures to minimize negative impacts or maximize positive impacts on sustainability related to the services provided;

b) Provide tourism services more sustainable;

c) Demonstrate that the tourism services provided meet applicable sustainability requirements. This document applies to any tourism organization, regardless of the nature (public or private), size, location, and related tourism services (or activities).

This document specifies the sustainability requirements and recommendations of tourism services applicable to the environmental, social, and economic dimensions.

Purpose

There are several challenges in transforming tourism services into sustainable ones. Some challenges are related to the characteristics of the sustainability approach, which demands a holistic view of many aspects of sustainability, such as water, energy, waste, gas emissions, local community, local culture, quality, safety, health, business viability, and local procurement. These aspects are directly related to tourism activities and produce impacts on the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability.

In this context, the tourism organization needs to address these aspects and impacts to become more sustainable, and the main challenge is making choices and managing all these subjects simultaneously.

Besides that, the tourism organization shall also consider the needs and expectations of the interested parties.

This leads us to an important conclusion: for the business or destination to be sustainable, the organization shall make its decisions considering measures to minimize negative impacts and maximize positive impacts.

In fact, sustainability is a never-ending process, not a state of excellence; what really counts is the constant attitude of trying to be environmentally responsible, socially just, and economically viable. So, considering that sustainability can be understood as a new approach to decision-making, it is clear that one key to improving sustainable tourism is to encourage tourism organizations to integrate sustainability into their operations.

But it is essential to understand that tourism organizations and destinations have different levels of maturity (in terms of sustainability), and offering a model as a tool to help them improve it would be very useful.

This approach (the sustainability maturity model) then demands the incorporation of sustainability into the management of the organization or destination, whether at the strategic or operational level. Thus, the results and benefits of sustainable tourism can be enhanced for all tourism actors and for the tourist destination over time.