To be sustainable or not to be. This is how it was manifested by Jeremy Smith, co-founder and editor of Travindy.com, collaborator of World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) and communicator specialised in responsible tourism in the latest edition of FiturGreen organised by the ITH (Technological Hotel Institute) and UNWTO (World Tourism Organisation). In addition, all the experts gathered agreed, “there is no doubt that the commitment to sustainability is profitable.”
Many studies reflect how the hotel industry is making progress in this area, both driven by customers and by tour operators, but especially, driven by the establishments’ main necessity to improve their competitiveness.
Providing information on the matter, Jeremy Smith showed that the cost to eliminate the effects of CO2 caused by tourists, ie, to make the tourism industry clean is of $ 11 per traveller, making the cost of converting to free carbon tourism of only 0.1% of the total economy generated by this activity.
However, customers find it difficult to differentiate between the many sustainability certifications in hotels and destinations. Therefore work remains to be done to advance as a sector, involving all the actors who are part of the tourism industry.