- Sustainable Management: This section encourages destinations to review their governance, stakeholder engagement, visitor volumes and activities, and risk and crisis management, among others. Users can easily indicate whether their practices are well in place or not or if they are still in progress.
- Socioeconomic Impacts: Here, destinations assess how tourism activities benefit local communities and economies, ensuring that tourism growth translates into tangible benefits for residents.
- Cultural Impacts: This area focuses on preserving and promoting local heritage and cultural identity, enabling destinations to gauge how well they safeguard cultural assets while welcoming visitors.
- Environmental Impacts: Addressing the consumption of resources, pollution reduction, and conservation of biodiversity and landscapes, this section empowers destinations to measure their environmental stewardship.
The tool’s simple ‘yes/no’ or ‘in progress’ answer format streamlines the self-assessment process, making it accessible even for destinations with limited resources or sustainability expertise. It offers a clear snapshot of current performance, highlighting areas for improvement and assigning a completion score (0-100%) to indicate low, moderate, or high performance. Additionally, destination managers and practitioners can reassess their progress over time, fostering continuous improvement in sustainable practices.
By completing all sections, destinations will gain valuable insights, actionable strategies, and tools for sustainable destination management, reducing environmental impact, promoting social responsibility, and supporting cultural sustainability.
Tiffany Chan, GSTC Destinations Program Manager, stated, “Our new self-assessment tool is an important step forward in helping destinations align with GSTC’s Destination Criteria. It is designed to be intuitive and practical, enabling destinations of all sizes to measure and improve their sustainability efforts.”
With its user-friendly interface and clear evaluation, the new tool is expected to serve as a valuable resource for destinations worldwide, providing them with a tangible pathway to benchmark their practices against the GSTC Destination Criteria.
