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The network for responsible hospitality, the Sustainable Hospitality Alliance (the Alliance), and the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (the GSTC), which establishes and manages global standards for sustainable travel and tourism, have announced a new co-operation agreement.
The pair said the new partnership will bring together the Alliance’s hospitality industry “reach and measurement expertise”, with the GSTC’s experience in sustainability standards and assurance, to “enhance the industry’s understanding of sustainability criteria and the need to capture robust sustainability data”.
The Alliance said that over recent years, greenwashing has become a “widespread issue globally” and across every industry, as companies all too often use “sustainability language to present a positive image, without evidence of any real impact”.
As such, the pair said it “could not be more vital to have solid standards and effective tools” to verify legitimate claims of sustainable business in the hospitality sector. They added this will be at the core of this new collaboration – combining the GSTC Criteria, accreditation programme and training opportunities with the Alliance’s industry leadership and bank of pioneering tools and initiatives.
Glenn Mandziuk, CEO of the Sustainable Hospitality Alliance, said: “We’re so pleased to be working in partnership with the GSTC. Our organisations have long understood the power of the hospitality and tourism industries as a vehicle for positive lasting change and have been working to measure and monitor this positive impact.
“Now is the time to unite our expertise, embedding sustainability criteria across the industry and ensuring every hotel has the tools and guidance needed to become a more regenerative business, that gives back more than it takes.”
Randy Durband, CEO of GSTC, added: “GSTC is increasingly supporting the development of universal measurement tools for sustainability in order to facilitate businesses assessing, benchmarking, and improving their performance on each of the criteria within the GSTC Criteria, and the Sustainable Hospitality Alliance’s work on sustainable measurement in hospitality is critical to that effort.
“We have engaged with the Alliance for many years but are pleased to formalise and expand our partnership.”
