Good morning everyone!
I’m super excited to share with you this newsletter about sustainability and tourism. It will be focus on what the sustainable tourism is, how to recognize a sustainable hotel, where to find those hotels, and an example of a traditional hotel making big steps towards being more respectful for the environment.
I really hope that you find this interesting and the next time you travel you check one of these articles to make sure that you are choosing correctly and sustainably.
Ana María del Cerro
This paper is 1324 words, just a 7 minutes read.
🌱🌍Sustainable Tourism🌍🌱
What is this about and how this type of tourism works
Have you ever heard about the concept of “Sustainable Tourism”? This type of tourism tries to follow some steps in order to develop the main touristic activities to have the lowest impact on the environment. The key concept is: to exploit a resource under the limit of its renewal. Besides, it is fundamental to respect the native culture of the place and spend the money in local stores, which will help to generate enough employment in that town/city/country.
The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) established three main keys in order to achieve the best tourism, the sustainable one:
Optimization of the environmental resources.
The authenticity of local culture.
Wealth distribution.
Apart from these three keys, UNWTO and UN created twelve objectives for this type of tourism:
Economic objective: to ensure the prosperity of the place and the long-term profits.
Local prosperity: to maximize the contribution of the visited place.
Employment quality: to build a strong and qualitative employment model.
Social equity: to make a fair wealth distribution in the receiving community.
Visitor’s satisfaction: to offer the safest and nicest visit without any discrimination.
Local control: to give the local population the power of decision-making.
Community wellness: to keep and increase the high quality of the local community.
Cultural wealth: respect the historic local monuments and their native culture.
Ecosystem integrity: with this, they are trying to avoid environmental degradation.
Biodiversity: to minimise the damage that can be caused in the natural areas.
Resource efficiency: to minimise the use of the non-renewable resources.
Environmental purity: reduce the pollution in air, water and ground as much as it is possible, apart from minimising the generation of waste and dust.
In conclusion, what all these objectives are trying to reach is the maximization of the local resources, not only the environmental ones, but also the human resources like their local culture, their history and their historic monuments.
SOURCE:
https://www.bbva.com/es/sostenibilidad/que-es-el-turismo-sostenible/
🏨How can a hotel be sustainable nowadays?🏨
How to recognize a sustainable hotels according to some characteristics
Have you ever wondered if you are travelling to sustainable places? Or if you are staying at sustainable hotels? Here you will find some characteristics that the hotels need to fulfil in order to add to their services the “sustainable” adjective.
Nowadays, having a minimum level of sustainability is required for some of the customers of hospitality because the climate change is here and there is no coming back. Some of those requirements that people tend to look are if the company is:
Respecting the natural surroundings of the place where the hotel is. However, it is not enough if the firm does not destroy nature, you need to respect the culture of the country, and a basic one: do not pollute.
Supporting the local businesses. People are looking to acquire knowledge from the visiting place’s culture, and the best way of having this is by buying from local firms and buying the indigenous products.
Promoting ecologic alimentary products. This point is very related to the previous one, because the firm can offer kilometer zero products, which are local and sustainable products because of how close they are done.
Having water-saving systems.
Basing mainly their energetic supply on renewable energies.
Having specific charging points for electric cars.
Using organic materials on their amenities and the basic clothes, like towels and bed sheets.
In conclusion, what these sustainable hotels are trying to achieve is to have the least impact on the environment and consequently, slowing down the climate change as much as they can as a company.
SOURCE:
https://www.ferrerhotels.com/travellost/en/what-a-sustainable-hotel-is/
🌱🌍The sustainable step of Booking🌍🌱
How can you find sustainable accommodation according to the webpage Booking.com
Nowadays, almost everyone goes online in order to find information about their next trip instead of going to the traditional travel agencies of their neighborhoods. Specially, those comparing prices sites about planes, trains or hotels. One of the most common ones is Booking and this is what I will be talking about now.
Booking.com is a Dutch online travel agency whose headquarters are located in Amsterdam. The website has over 28 million listings and it is available in more than 40 languages, meaning that it is open to everybody.
The last step that this website has taken in order to be greener is to add the label: “Sustainable Trips”. This new worldwide label will be available for all the users and it will give them the information about the place that they need according to the sustainability. Apart from that, the owners of every type of accommodation can ask for this recognition if they implement a combination of specific sustainable measures, like the three R (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle) or to use renewable energy, and if they fulfill the requisites about sustainability in the destination.
In conclusion, the main purpose of creating this label is to give the customers an easier way of accessing the information of this type of service from a reliable source, which in this case is Booking.com. Besides, this information is transparent, coherent and simple as the webpage is behind this and their requisites, apart from the ones of the destination. At the end, they want to give the clientele different options to choose wisely their vacation or business accommodations.
SOURCES:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booking.com
https://tecnohotelnews.com/2021/11/15/booking-viajes-mas-sostenibles/
https://tecnohotelnews.com/2021/10/10/economia-circular-descarbonizacion-hoteles/
🌱🏨Circular Economy of Parador El Saler🏨🌱
A real example of an accommodation that is taking steps in been more sustainable
Have you ever heard about the Spanish hospitality company chain “Paradores”? It is a public company which was founded in 1928 when they opened their first hotel in Gredos, Ávila. They started to grow and nowadays they have 96 establishments: 95 in Spain and 1 in Portugal.
In this particular case, I’m going to talk about the hotel they have in Valencia, specifically in El Saler. They have done two practical projects of a circular economy which I’m going to explain now.
Firstly, Paradores have installed a runway to the beach which has been done only with recycled plastic and manufactured by a local plant in Valencia, CM Plastik. They have used around 60 kilograms of plastic which were picked up by the volunteers from the beach apart from 600 kilograms of plastic from the rubbish dump. The facilities that are created with this type of plastic tend to be more endurance and durability. By recycling all this plastic, they will reduce pollution and greenhouse gases leading to the mitigation of climate change.
Secondly, Paradores have a collaboration with the Xaloc NGO in which both companies have arrived at the agreement of manually cleaning the rubbish from the nature reservation in which the hotel is placed, specifically non-organic residuous which can damage the sealife.
Besides these two actions, Paradores has removed the single use plastic amenities from their rooms, they buy from local manufacturers acquiring 0 km products and the 100% of the electric energy they use is renewable.
In conclusion, they are trying to improve their behaviours and changing their habits and policies in order to achieve the higher levels of sustainability they can.
SOURCES:
https://tecnohotelnews.com/2020/01/14/parador-el-saler-pasarela-plastico/
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradores_de_Turismo_de_España#Crecimiento
Additional recommendation
Finally, here you have a super interesting video that gives you 5 ideas if you want to make a sustainable trip around the world.