Published by Climate Trade
The trend towards sustainable tourism is strong. Travel and accommodation contracting agencies for large companies and public administrations in Spain are beginning to incorporate better environmental practices in their services. Tourist destinations that promote these practices are even receiving funding as a key to competitiveness.
According to Climate Trade, European Next Generation funds for the tourism sector in Spain prioritize projects focused on incorporating sustainability in general and environmental impact management.
The Government of Spain and the European Commission agreed on the tourism sustainability program for the period 2021-2023. This mechanism supports tourism destinations in their transformation into hubs or innovation poles capable of integrating environmental, socioeconomic and territorial sustainability into their offer, and of developing resilience strategies to face the new challenges of the tourism ecosystem, from climate change to tourism overdemand or health and safety crises.
The agreement seeks to improve the competitiveness of the destinations, with actions to prevent or mitigate the effects of climate change and reduce polluting emissions, among others.
Last November, the Leadership Summit on Mobility Sustainability and Digitization was held in Seville. The debate focused on policies, best practices and management tools, aimed at executives and managers in the areas of operations, finance and marketing.
The most widely accepted route was to start with the calculation of pollutant emissions, then reduce as much as possible the carbon footprint, which contributes directly to sustainable development objectives and local communities, to demonstrate the positive impact of their actions.
A second key area is the management of tourist mobility and transportation in the destination. It is recommended to focus on the most polluting forms of travel, and the availability of new models of passenger transportation vehicles with lower environmental impacts, such as electric vehicles.
With sustainability as a new force to revive tourism in general, it is important to measure the impact and how it is reported to tourists, operators, and destination managers. Then, they require visualization solutions, such as digital transparency portals, charts with real-time indicators of the current day and the history of previous days.
Managing the user experience and the tourist's perception of the destination's environmental sustainability becomes the key to the destination's competitiveness now and in the future, when these indicators are compared with those of other tourist destinations.
Climate Trade indicates that, in the very near future, tourism destinations will be compared, among other criteria, by the carbon footprint that tourists and operators have during their stays, as is already the case in other sectors and services.
Source: Climate Trade
