Beyond Hotels: Nature-Based Certification in Europe

Within the travel and tourism industry in Europe today there are some 5000 recipients of green certification logos, including a wide range of accommodations as well as tour operators, destinations, golf courses, parks, beaches, and marinas. As discussed in chapter 7, since the 1980s, scores of eco-sensitive certification programs in Europe were developed in a piecemeal fashion by a variety of government agencies, NGOs, and industry association to cover parts of the mass, sustainable, and ecotourism markets. Both the loose use of terminology and Europe’s large number of small, sometimes overlapping, certification systems create customer and industry confusion.2 Most of the green certification schemes described in the previous chapter measure the environmental impacts or management of a tourism structure or business such as a lodge or tour operator. This chapter aims to demonstrate that certification programs that measure the quality of natural areas may be more likely to succeed than certification schemes of tourism facilities because they assess aspects of the environment that are more important to both long term sustainability and to the traveling public. This will be illustrated by examining two nature-based certification programs in Europe, the well-established Blue Flag for beaches and the World Wide Fund for Nature’s PAN Parks program that is in its inception stages