Reaffirming Booking.com’s commitment to showcase more sustainable travel options to its customers, and to help support accommodation partners on actions they can take to operate more sustainably, the digital travel platform has announced some updates to how it will display more sustainable choices to travelers around the world, focusing on third-party certifications.
Booking.com will now introduce a label to acknowledge when a property has achieved a third-party sustainability certification (according to Booking.com’s definition on the matter) coupled with the ability to filter searches accordingly. To date, over 16,500 properties have a this label displayed on the platform. Moving forward, the Travel Sustainable name, logo and levels will no longer be displayed.
Sustainability is a core component of Booking.com’s mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world, and over the past decade the company has been shaping its work in this space. Booking.com’s approach continues to be developed in consultation with independent experts and organizations such as the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) and UN Tourism, striving to explore how best to address some of the challenges travelers face in making more sustainable choices. The goal is to find new ways to help bridge the gap between the number of accommodations with third-party certifications and the breadth of choice available in the market, encouraging accommodation partners to progress towards third-party certification.
Partners will continue to be able to indicate practices they have adopted across categories including water, food waste, energy, plastic and local community, helping travelers understand the efforts underway.
In the context of regulatory shifts and in anticipation of relevant legislation coming into place, the updates introduced today represent an evolution in how Booking.com recognizes more sustainable choices – but its commitment to making it easier for travelers to make more sustainable travel choices by supporting accommodations to operate more sustainably remains. Booking.com will continue to explore the most impactful role it can play in this space, maintaining its support of its partners, customers and the broader industry as they collaboratively strive to make more sustainable travel the way everyone can experience the world.
View the original article here: https://news.booking.com/bookingcom–prioritizing-third-party-certifications/
Become a Certified Sustainable Hotel
Sustainability certification for hotels is a voluntary, third-party assessment through an audit to ensure compliance with sustainable tourism standards.
Not all those claiming to be providing a third-party certification actually follow international norms of proper certification. Therefore, it is crucial to choose certification by Accredited Certification Bodies, which is the highest level of assurance in existence.
In short, accreditation is a mark of quality and credibility of the certification body to operate in a transparent and impartial procedure and competent manner. Sometimes this is colloquially referred to as “certifying the certifier”.
Businesses certified by a GSTC-Accredited Certification Body can display a unique GSTC logo with a traceable code.
While GSTC does not conduct certification. Global Certification Bodies (CB) conduct certification, while GSTC acts as the international body for sustainable tourism certification.
Learn more about how to become certified as a sustainable hotel here.
