[My blog on TTG website, ttgdigital.com]

One of the most interesting events of WTM for me was the launch by Kuoni of the UK’s first Fair Trade-certified holiday.

Kuoni teamed up with Fair Trade in Tourism South Africa (FTTSA), which has been working to promote the importance of fair trade in tourism for a decade, in order to gain certification of all aspects of the supply chain on a 13-night South Africa package.

While the concept of fairly-traded cocoa or bananas is easy enough to comprehend, fairly-traded tourism is more complicated – which is perhaps why it’s taken until now for it to develop.

I asked FTTSA’s executive director Jennifer Seif what the Fair Trade stamp on Kuoni’s package holiday actually represents. She explained that all accommodation providers on the itinerary have been vetted to ensure their staff are paid a fair wage and have good working conditions, and that their suppliers are paid fairly.

Kuoni’s commitment to the accommodation and local ground-handlers it uses include paying 100% of its bills before a client travels, and paying cancellation fees if forced to cancel a booking. “There’s an unwritten rule that hotels don’t ask for the money, but it can be very hard on small businesses,” said Seif.

While a fair, minimum price can be put on commodities like bananas, Seif said this doesn’t work in tourism, as prices fluctuate so much. ”What we do instead is say you cannot push for a discount, and we demand a transparency so people know who is paying what,” she said.

The £2,995 price tag on Kuoni’s package also includes a $50-$60 ‘premium’ which goes into a separate fund, to be spent on socio-economic projects that benefit those involved in the supply chain. Seif hopes to soon have 20-30 operators like Kuoni bringing 5,000 clients to South Africa on this kind of Fair Trade package each year. “That’s three million rand, or about £250,000, of new money for development,” she says.

She acknowledged clients might not yet look for Fair Trade when booking their holiday. “But when they get there and hear about the Fair Trade ethos and feel good about staying there, that is when they tell their friends and the hotel benefits from word-of-mouth marketing and repeat business,” she explained.

Harriet Lamb, the UK’s executive director of The Fair Trade Foundation, said at the Kuoni/South Africa launch that consumers WILL pay more for fairly-traded holidays. “Of course people want a bargain but if you tell them these bananas -or this package holiday – is cheap because the people behind it aren’t getting a fair deal, people will pay more,” she said.

There’s a lot of cash-strapped UK consumers who right now are understandably reluctant to pay a penny more for a holiday than they absolutely have to.

But when she opened World Responsible Tourism Day on Wednesday, Harriet Lamb reminded us of how the Archbishop of York described our responsibility to support Fair Trade: “Fair trade is not charity. It’s justice”, he said.

And for the future of destinations like South Africa, where being paid fairly can be the means of a climbing out of poverty, I hope the vision of a global Fair Trade mark for tourism becomes a reality soon.

It’s a hotel I first learnt about at World Travel Market last year, when it won the ‘best accommodation for the environment‘ category at the Responsible Tourism Awards.

As well as using 65% solar power and buying produce direct from local fishermen and farmers, one of the innovations that really stands out for me in this video is a local paper-making project, where the hotel gives shredded waste paper to local craftswomen to be turned into guest stationery – which the hotel then buys back. A perfect example of a project that is both environmentally conscious and socially beneficial! Watch the full story of how this hotel is breaking the mould in the Caribbean here.

The Bluefields Bay reserve is now a year old, and it seems that fish stocks have gone from strength to strength since my visit at the start of the year. The wardens who patrol the sanctuary are now seeing a return of sea-birds too, especially the blue pelican – which does not heed the no-fishing zone!

Click here to watch the video in full.

Click here to read my blog from January.

A Q&A with Anthony Climpson OBE, tourism manager of the New Forest

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Canoeing in the New Forest

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Exploring beyond the New Forest National Park

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Conservation volunteering in the New Forest

Primrose Valley is just one of the hotel’s featured on the St Ives tourist board’s new iPhone app. It features nine places to stay, lots of bars and restaurants, things to do and sites of interest, and lots of useful contact details for trains, taxis, boat hire and more – all pinpointed on the an interactive map.

Though the information is not exhaustive – there are lots more restaurants to choose from in St Ives – it is a very handy guide. The app costs £1.19

Read the full piece here

The National Forest has launched a new visitors’ website with a focus on ‘going green’.

The site emphasises eco-friendly attractions and places to stay within the forest, and encourages visitors to use public transport and explore by bike or on foot rather than driving.

The National Forest covers an area of 200 square miles in Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire, and 7.7 million trees have already been planted since the project began in 1991.

Low-impact accommodation within the forest includes the YHA National Forest, which has bio-fuel boilers and solar panels and collects rainwater to flush the loos. At Roliston Forestry Centre there are six sustainable-timber lodges, and visitors can camp at the Conkers Camping and Caravanning Club. The website also highlights hotels and guesthouses which have achieved a Green Tourism Business Scheme award.

Most of the National Forest’s visitors are day-trippers but the number of people staying overnight is rising, up from 4% in 2001 to 10% in 2007. “It’s an area that we’re really targeting because overnight stays bring more economic benefit to the destination and they have a smaller impact on the environment than the same increase in day visitors,” explains Penny Wilkinson of the National Forest Company. “Our job is to try to get them to use sustainable transport methods when they are here.”

Most visitors currently come by car, but Penny says they hope this will change: “We actively promote cycle hire and we’re developing more trails and facilities for cycling. We’ve supported several new off-road routes, for example, including over 20km of new and improved trails.”

There is a special family cycling route, the Conkers Circuit, and a further 14km of family-friendly off-road trails will be developed soon. Links to routes 6, 54 and 63 of the National Cycle Network are also to be promoted.

A ‘hop on, hop off’ open-top bus in the summer months helps people get around, and the forest hopes to increase groups visiting by coach as opposed to individuals coming by car.

The National Forest only has one railway station, Burton upon Trent, within it but visitors will be encouraged to use stations in towns like Loughborough, Tamworth, and Lichfield as entry points. Penny adds that expanding canal access could provide more ‘green access’ in the future.

The ‘going green’ section of the new website also encourages the purchase of local produce, with a 12-page guide from the National Forest Food Network, and highlights forest activities like planting trees, woodland crafts and llama trekking.

New features elsewhere on the site include downloadable maps for short, medium and long walks; an expanded cycling section with maps; and more comprehensive information on the other attractions and activities available in the forest.

• If you’re interested in cycling, see greentraveller’s selection of cycling holidays in England

CEO Guido Bauer revealed the difference that a Green Globe certificate can make to a hotel’s bottom line: having the certificate lets hotels increase their room rates by 3-7%, reduces their operating costs by 3-11%, and adds 1-3% to the property’s value.

It’s great that they have proof of the financial benefit – in a cash-strapped economy like the Caribbean, a financial incentive for greening your business is particularly necessary.

I’m a little sceptical about such certification schemes though. Firstly, Green Globes are like several other schemes in that hotels pay to join the organisation which can’t fail to at least slightly compromise their impartiality.

Secondly, a hotel does not need to meet all or even most of the list of criteria in order to pass: they must satisfy just 51%. Some of the criteria are extremely difficult to satisfy (the newest criteria is PVC-free room keys) but you’ve got to ask – what about the other 49%?

I also had trouble with Guido’s comments that Caribbean countries are the most advanced region in the world in terms of sustainability, ahead of nearest contenders New Zealand / Australia / France.

Having stayed in countless hotels in the Caribbean which do not recycle, which turn the air-con on in my room while I’m not there, and which fly in food and beverages from around the world, I found this hard to believe.

Doubly hard after the lecture I attended in December in which Kristian Teleki of SeaWeb told us that outside Europe and North America, 80% of sewage enters the coastal ocean untreated – including in the Caribbean. Tourism is by far the biggest industry in the Caribbean so if 80% of its sewage is untreated, some of this must surely be coming from the hotels. Hardly sustainable!

I put this to Guido Bauer but he said he won’t accept that this is the case with the Caribbean…. I’m going to see if Kristian can point me in the direction of some further info.

Its work in tourism ranges from training hotel staff on green technology, to helping them attain certificates of sustainability, to educating tourists on how they can minimise their own impact upon the environment while on holiday.

Its sustainable tourism programme began in Ecuador but it’s really been picking up pace, and has recently signed agreements with the  Guatemala tourist board, and CATA, a tourist board for the whole Central American region.

The Alliance’s Federico Salano tells me he’s seen interest in and take-up of sustainable tourism really surge in the last five years. Europeans are particularly ethically-conscious travellers, he adds.

“You simply cannot make business with European companies if you don’t have a sustainable tourism programme now,” he says. “Now it’s a reality more than a trend.”

There are several UK tour operators who currently work with the Rainforest Alliance, with more big names to come onboard soon. Signing an agreement with the Alliance means the operator commits to ensuring that half of the hotels and other businesses it works with have appropriate green certification.

It sounds like a fantastic programme, but I wonder if they could perhaps set the bar even higher. What’s to stop a tour operator dealing with the most gas-guzzling, tree-felling, water-polluting tourism businesses in the Americas for the other 50% of their business?

One thing’s for sure: the system of green accreditation and certification within the tourism industry needs a proper sort out. There are so many confusing acronyms out there – STCNA, CST, STEP and QTC to name a few – that you can’t see the wood for the trees, if you’ll excuse the pun.

Federico tells me that the Rainforest Alliance is teaming up with the UN and several other bodies to launch the Tourism Sustainability Council or TSC in April next year. It will be the ‘certifier for certifications’, “giving order to the myriad certifications and checklists around the world,” he says.

Great news, but I wish they’d come up with a snappier name!

It’s going through an exciting period right now. It’s hoping to sign codeshare agreements with international players like Continental Airlines, Copa, Mexicana and Iberia in the near future.

This means passengers won’t have to check their luggage back in at Costa Rica’s San Jose airport before they fly onto their final destination with NatureAir.

The airline currently flies only within Costa Rica and to Panama and Nicaragua, but commercial director Alexi Khajavi told me he hopes to expand into Colombia, Honduras and Guatemala soon too.

The airline is based in Costa Rica and offsets all of the carbon emissions it creates by supporting reforestation and conservation projects. It also uses some of the most fuel-efficient aircraft on the market, and runs its craft on biofuel. In May this year, it won a prestigious award for conservation from the World Travel and Tourism Council.

“In one year, what we emit through 100,000 flights is the same as a Boeing 747 in one flight from New York to Heathrow,” Alexi says.

When you see the vast list of ways in which NatureAir gives back – both to the environment and to local communities – you might suppose the airline would struggle to make a profit, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“None of our sustainable practices would matter if we weren’t a profit-making business, which we are,” says Alexi. “We’ve taken market share, and we’re growing at a rate of 20% per year.”

I can’t see why other domestic and regional airlines have not followed suit; committing to carbon neutrality certainly seems to have been a successful business model for NatureAir. Alexi points out that NatureAir’s typical client is environmentally-conscious and does not mind paying slightly more for their ticket, in order to fly with a more sustainable airline.

Alexi would certainly welcome other airlines copying NatureAir’s example: “We will always be the first airline to go carbon neutral but we don’t want to be the only one,” he says. “The aviation business is going in this direction. You’ve either got to get on the bus or you’re going to get run over.”

I was impressed to hear that Alexi’s colleagues are attending Copenhagen next month to represent the aviation industry alongside five or six massive international carriers. A “David and Goliath situation” by Alexi’s own admission but NatureAir seems to have just the kind of forward-thinking the aviation industry so desperately needs.