Sustainable tourism considers equally economical, social and environmental aspects of tourism destinations. By respecting all three, it provides long run development with respect of caring capacity. Eco-certification, on the other hand, influences both supply and demand side of tourism market, and increases consumer’s confidence.
Key words: sustainability, tourism, and certification
Sustainable tourism is tourism, which concerns total economic, social and environmental impact, by caring for the needs of tourists, economy, environment and local communities. (Making Tourism More Sustainable, UNWTO&UNEP, 2011). As a segment of the global economy, sustainable tourism has been deeply influenced by climate changes, as one of the most important
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In order to have coordination according to the above table, modern practice has developed few mechanism of enhancing sustainable development, such as: limitation of number of visitors in protected areas; system of so called Caring Capacity, which means precise degree of possible and desired construction in tourist destination; creation of taxes for sustainable development, and other means of legal infrastructure, that improves desired growth of tourist output according to concept of sustainable development, which every destination should design, having respect to the specific environment: political, economical, social, technological, ecological and legal.(Perovic, …show more content…
We are primarily concerned on defining benefits of eco-certification, both on supply and demand side. Supply side, or providers in tourism industry, are primarily interested on obtaining increased efficiency when eco-certification is introduced in their daily activities. If we choose just one eco-certification scheme, broadly used in European Union, EU Ecolabel, we know that there are 29 mandatory and 61 facultative measures needed to be integrated in order to obtain EU Ecolabel standard. What is common for all those parameters? They all influence increase of resource efficiency and therefore are climate concerned. Eco-certification improves efficiency of resource management in operations of all aspects, such as: energy, water, employee management, waste, cleaning and disinfection materials, and other services. All these aspects positively direct development of sustainable tourism. At the demand side, increased image and ecological concern influence that these providers have increased brand reputation. Consequently, consumers are ready to pay more for eco-certified accommodation units. Even more, eco-friendly consumers tend to be good promoters of destination, which respects environment in such eco-standardized