Blog

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Tourism businesses are facing increasing pressures to conduct their activity in a sustainable way to reduce their impact on the planet and contribution to climate change or biodiversity loss. A sustainability certification for tourism businesses can help provide structure and guidance with clearly defined steps to take to achieve these sustainability goals.

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Tourism often plays an important role in a destination’s economic development, bringing in visitors to spend money in local businesses, inward investment to develop infrastructure and providing jobs for residents. However, managing a destination sustainably is not an easy task. Tourism, if not planned and managed appropriately can become destructive – over tourism, degradation of the environment, loss of culture, disruption of local community’s lives, seasonality, etc.

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Social media has become an incremental part of any business’ digital marketing strategy. With a constantly growing number of users, social media is a convenient and cost-effective way for a business to reach the market, engage with consumers and grow.

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Destinations are complex entities with many stakeholders that may have different interests. They are also faced with an increasing number of challenges linked to economic, social, and environmental sustainability. For destinations sustainability is a journey which requires constant work and improvement.

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Sustainable destination management is as much a necessity as it is challenging. A destination is a very complex ecosystems composed of multiple stakeholders that can sometimes have competing interests. Organisation, cooperation, collaboration, consideration of all stakeholders and effective systems for measuring and monitoring are essential. Sustainable destination management is not a target to achieve, it is a journey and ever evolving. A destination can never truly be sustainable, but some are getting pretty close! 

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Most individuals and businesses are becoming more aware of their carbon footprint and mindful that emissions should not creep back up to pre pandemic levels. At Acorn Tourism, we’ve been trying to work out how we can make our operations carbon neutral.

The journey has not been simple…

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Monitoring inhabitants’ satisfaction has been identified by global sustainable destinations management standards as one of the essential guidelines to follow when working towards a more sustainable tourism industry. The local community is likely to be the one that suffers rather than benefits from tourism activities when their needs are not considered in tourism development.  Tourism activities are likely to disrupt residents’ quality of life: more traffic, less access to the city centre due to higher prices, etc.

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You cannot manage what you cannot measure… Measuring and monitoring are essential tools when it comes to tourism. Whether the goal is sustainable, transformative, or regenerative tourism, a destination cannot effectively establish and achieve objectives if specific indicators are not measured to show evolution over time.

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Managing a destination sustainably is not an easy task, and there are various threats and challenges that destinations are increasingly facing.  And carbon offsetting and planting trees will, unfortunately, not be enough.  From threats linked to climate change and increasing GHG atmospheric concentrations to challenges related to the wellbeing of the population and visitors, the management of waste, energy, water but also culture and heritage, and the engagement of local businesses, it can sometimes be challenging to identify the next steps a destination should take.

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On the 10th of January 2002, Alison Burgh and Kevin Millington created Acorn Tourism Consulting Ltd. In 20 years, the tourism industry has evolved dramatically, our work has significantly changed, but the people that we have met along the way have remained as inspiring and resilient!

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The Green Destinations Top 100 Stories is an annual competition launched in 2014 to help destinations at different stages of their journey towards sustainable and regenerative tourism. The Top 100 is an effective tool for every destination, whether they are looking to learn more about reporting and communicating sustainability, wanting to establish themselves as an industry leader by sharing an innovative project implemented, or looking for an achievable yet ambitious first step to learn more about destination sustainability guidelines.

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The Falkland Islands, a remote South Atlantic archipelago, has recently been selected to the 2021 Top 100 list released every year by Green Destinations.

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One tool to understand your visitors’ characteristics, behaviour, motivations, and satisfaction with their experience as well as evaluate volume and expenditure of your tourists in your destination: the visitor satisfaction survey.

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Embedding sustainable practices into all aspects of a tourism business has become more common these days.  It is widely understood that sustainability is key to minimise the negative impacts (such as over tourism, exploitation of children and wild animals, inauthentic tourism activities and poorly paid seasonal jobs) and maximise the positive impacts (such as promoting cultural heritage, job creation for economic independence, protection of wildlife species and habitats, job creation, community-led tourism).

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Digitalisation has transformed the way companies do business.  In the tourism industry, purchasing flights online and booking hotel rooms on the Internet marked the early days of digital transformation in the sector.  

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Blue tourism is a term used to describe Coastal and Maritime tourism. The sector has become an increasing source of income for destinations with attractive coastlines thanks to the development of multiple tourism activities such as cruise tourism, boating, watersports, scuba diving, marine life observation, fishing and recreational use of beaches. However, these activities often put a lot of pressure on local ecosystems and tend to damage the destinations’ environmental assets, which, very often are what visitors are attracted to in the destination. Sustainable development of these blue tourism destinations is therefore becoming critical to avoid altering their natural resources to a point of no return. 

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Sustainable tourism encompasses much more than solely protecting the environment in the destination, even though that is essential of course. A sustainable destination must be one that cares for its wildlife and landscapes, but also one that cares for its inhabitants! When thinking about tourism, one often thinks about visitors and the private tourism sector within the destination. But sometimes we forget the most important stakeholder: the local community, which is not always directly linked to the tourism sector.

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Before COVID-19, the ‘bleisure’ travel trend, defined as a mix of business and leisure travel, was taking off, driven by the Millennials (or Gen Y), a large, important travelling group.  Already keen travellers, Millennials are well known to be keen on experiential travel that offers an authentic insight into a destination, immersing themselves into new cultures and local lives. 

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Walking tourism is a very popular tourism activity and can be enjoyed almost anywhere in the world. Walking is suitable for different levels of ability and is a low impact, sustainable activity that everyone can feel good about taking part in.

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As food plays a central part in the lives of all people on the planet and local specialities are widely appreciated as an intrinsic feature of many cultures, it is now well understood that local cuisines play an important role in offering the visitor an authentic insight into the culture of a place.

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Why data management is a vital step on the road to recovery...