UK: The Sustainable Hospitality Alliance and the Global Sustainable Tourism Council have formed a partnership to consolidate best practice in sustainable hospitality and tourism.
This 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.
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.
Within the hospitality industry, the number of ways in which companies are required to report ESG data for different stakeholders and countries, can also lead to difficulties in benchmarking companies and therefore difficult to establish best practice.
Solving this issue 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.”
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