ECO certification and tourism operators: marketing and operational issues

The objectives of this paper are twofold: (1) to examine the alignment between visitor and operator perceptions on the importance of different attributes of certification, and (2) to look for evidence of the belief that certification improves operators' performance. Over 600 visitors and 48 tourism operators in and around the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area, Australia, provided data on the popular ECO Certification Program ®. Using just the mean scores of importance, the study found that visitors and operators had similar views: both perceived Nature and Marketing as the most important attributes and Conservation and Culture as the least important attributes. However, statistically, operators 'valued' Nature, Community, Customer and Marketing significantly higher than visitors. To examine that certification improves performance, we collected data about operators’ subjective views of their own performance (self-assessed) and visitors’ subjective views of operator performance. These perceptions of performance were then validated with independent, actual objective measures. To facilitate comparisons, data were segmented according to certification status. Across the majority of attributes, ECO certified operators self-scored their performance higher, but not significantly so, than did their non-ECO certified counterparts. According to visitors, ECO certified operators out-performed their non-ECO certified counterparts on many attributes and these were statistically significant. Objective measures of performance confirmed these perceptions: ECO certified operators are 'better' on most attributes – however, these results need to be interpreted with caution, given the small sample size