Analyses Tools for Event Sustainability Certification in Destinations

There is a debate about responsible and sustainable development in tourist destinations. One could argue that event companies have a responsibility for sustainability, but they lack the analyses tools. The purpose is to investigate and analyse how companies working with events could develop a certification process of sustainability, and how decisions about an event’s sustainability certification could be supported. The analysis is based on both the study of relevant literature and investigations carried out and by using multi-criteria decision-making systems. A sustainable certification process is developed which consists of external company sustainability criteria, such as social, cultural, economic and ecological dimension, and also internal criteria such as using a sustainability plan. However, in this study certification obstacles have been found, for example certification costs. When developing the sustainability certification process a need is recognised for a decision support tool. Therefore a triangulation multi-criteria decision-making model is proposed consisting of six steps: 1. Problem formulation, 2. Computer criteria definition, 3. Definition of measures and rules, 4. Data collection and registering, 5. Total evaluation of the alternatives' results and 6. Final analysis and choice. When using the model there is a need for an integrated manual assessment by the evaluator and the computerbased expert system support. Therefore, triangulation of mainly qualitative research methods is used starting with qualitative interviews with an inductive approach by the evaluator, continuing with computer-based expert system analysis (the DEXi-system) with a logical interpretation approach and ending with the evaluator's deep interpretation of both manual and computer-based results