GSTC 2021 Online Members Meeting

The GSTC 2021 Online Members Meeting that took place on December 7th and 9th, brought together a total of 250 participants from 59 countries in the two meetings.

Every year, GSTC holds a professional conference focusing on sustainable tourism, standards, certifications, and the GSTC Criteria. The themes are different each year, with a changing focus on different sustainability aspects from the GSTC Criteria. Due to the pandemic, we could not hold an on-site conference and instead held the GSTC 2021 Online Members Meeting on December 7th (for Asia-Pacific, Europe, Africa time-zones) and December 9th (for the Americas, Europe, Africa time-zones).

«The pandemics has been a devastating shock to tourism with millions of jobs lost and thousands of businesses (particularly SMEs) in bankrupt. The problems have not really changed: overtourism, global warming, waste of resources (and food), reduction of biodiversity, plastic pollution, etc. We must take the opportunity to restart better than before and reduce those negative impacts that already threatened the growth of tourism,» said GSTC Chair, Mr. Luigi Cabrini. «GSTC proved to be valuable during the pandemics, as demonstrated by the pace of new memberships, the relevance of the new members, the attendance at our training courses, and the global use of the GSTC Criteria.»

At the end of his opening remarks, GSTC Chair Luigi Cabrini announced that the GSTC 2022 Global Sustainable Tourism Conference will be hosted in Seville, Spain, during 12th-15th December 2022, with María del Mar Carnero, Congress & MICE Manager of Sevilla City Office, inviting all GSTC Members to visit Seville in December 2022.

The Meeting continued to with a presentation by GSTC CEO, Randy Durband, about GSTC’s Mission and Current Activities.

The second part of the Meeting focused on examples of Implementation of the GSTC Framework:

• «Sustainable Luxury Travel and the Considerate Collection» by Christopher Grime, Head of Product Integration, Small Luxury Hotels of the World (SLH)
• «Sustainable Business Travel and Boosting Sustainable Hotel Bookings» by Nicole Sautter, Analyst Global Sustainability Risk, Compliance & ESG, American Express Global Business Travel; and Vibhav Singh, Consulting Manager, Global Business Consulting – APAC, American Express Global Business Travel
• «Developing National Strategy Using Existing Standards – Swisstainable» by Samuel Wille, Deputy Head of Business Development, Switzerland Tourism
• «Applying the GSTC Destination Criteria – Establishing Sustainability Councils in the Bahamas» by Janel Campbell, Manager Sustainability Department, Bahamas Ministry of Tourism & Aviation

The third part was an open discussion led by CB Ramkumar, GSTC Board Member & South Asia Director, and Rika Jean-François, ITB Berlin CSR Commissioner and GSTC Board Member. The open discussion allowed all participating members to share insights and ideas.

Recording and presentations

Recordings of the Online Members Meeting is available for logged-in GSTC Members and can be accessed here.

GSTC2022 Conference in Sevilla