Using the GSTC Destination Standard

People often think that the criteria presented in the  Global Sustainable Tourism Council’s standards are mainly for certification. For an enterprise, the challenge of meeting them seems manageable. For advocates facing the complexities of a destination, certification may seem a climb too steep. Why try? But getting certified is not always the point. As CEO Randy Durband explains, it’s better to view the GSTC criteria as a process where every step counts.

Not Just for Certification: GSTC-D Criteria Are Useful for Any Aspiring Destination

At GSTC we emphasize that sustainability is a journey, and the GSTC Destination Standard provides a roadmap on that journey for policy-makers and destination managers. 

How did our Destination Standard come to be? GSTC was created to provide a common language for sustainability. We claim to manage “the” global standards for sustainability, basing that claim on two aspects: UN agencies created us with the mandate to apply UN definitions for sustainability to our standards, and also we conduct a highly inclusive process to create the criteria for the standards and to periodically revise them.

A Common Language

Why is a common language needed generally for sustainability and how does that apply in particular to the GSTC Destination Standard? First, the breadth of sustainability is not well understood, and most people have their own conceptions of what sustainable tourism means. Second, the transition to sustainability in all aspects of human activity is moving too slowly, and we need a systematic approach. That requires standardization.

Sustainability is a Journey – In Need of a Map

Certification is not the first step in the sustainability journey – part of it, but mainly a goal to steer by. For a destination to start its journey and to self-assess its progress, GSTC-D (our shorthand for the GSTC Destination Standard) is useful in these ways:

1. The criteria are available free of charge from gstc.org and can be used for internal training and awareness by all stakeholders of a destination.
2. Also free of charge is a self-assessment tool to use occasionally as an internal scorecard to track progress in complying to the many aspects of sustainability indicated in GSTC-D.
3. GSTC offers affordable training online and on-site teachers for learning  how to alter practices in order to align line by line to GSTC-D.
4. Along the journey, it’s valuable to repeat the self-assessments in order to monitor progress and to celebrate improvement amongst team players.
5. Measurement and reporting are not skills generally mastered by  people  focused on providing and marketing tourism services. Destination management teams therefore need to develop those skills. That is best done with the same framework and terminology as used in training and conducting self-assessments.
6. Applying those steps and scoring well on honest self-assessment provides indicators as to when it’s feasible for a destination to seek 3rd-party certification. Having become familiar with GSTC-D from the start makes the step toward being audited from the outside far easier than the alternative.

Whether destination  policy-makers see value in certification or not, measuring and reporting using the common language of GSTC-D allows for broader understanding of sustainability and the specific tasks involved than would a pell-mell use of miscellaneous techniques.

Governance, Governance, Governance

Among these many values,  GSTC sees the greatest value above all to be guidance for good governance by the public sector and its local partners, so that they may collaborate in implementing all the elements of sustainability inherent in the holistic Destination Standard.

Traditionally, Destination Marketing Organizations promoted but did not manage or develop tourism.  It was not in the DMO mandate, not in their job descriptions. Unlike aviation and land transport, highly regulated for safety and availability, most components of the travel and tourism supply chain have received little attention. In today’s complex global environment and social order dominated by hyper-information sharing and tremendous demand for sustainability in all sectors of human activity, tourism has lagged behind in terms of management and development.

Experience has shown that progress cannot be made for tourism at the municipal, provincial/state, or national level without development of an effective governance structure.  When the GSTC Destination Standard was first created, the first two criteria called for a formal strategy  and for development of a multi-stakeholder approach to managing a destination. We used the word “council” as the generic, catch-all term, recognizing that the terminology can vary across linguistic and cultural groupings. Regardless, the essence is this:  Strong performance on sustainability at the destination level cannot happen without meaningful participation of these three components of good destination governance:

1. A “whole government” approach where the tourism department might lead but also intensely collaborates with other agencies such as transport, vocational education, finance, infrastructure, environment, culture, and others. Collaboration includes informing all the others of the value and needs of tourism to the local economy and community life.
2. Engagement with the private sector. This is best accomplished through strong relationships with relevant trade associations that have effective means of connection with a broad range of travel and tourism industry players, including supply chains.
3. Engagement with the community, best accomplished through engagement with fair-minded civic associations and nonprofit institutions.

The Magic Ingredient

We feel so strongly that this is the magic ingredient, the single most important and common aspect of successful “destination stewardship” that upon the GSTC Destination Standard’s first formal revision we changed the sequencing and labeled the Criterion relating to governance structure as A1. We passionately believe that widespread compliance to Criterion A1 is the necessary element that allows for strong performance in all other components of the GSTC Destination Standard.

A destination’s roadmap to sustainability relies in large part on such collaborative governance and the formal strategy that it sets in motion.

Randy Durband is CEO of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council.