Ratings for Green Hotels

Ron E. Mader (ron@GREENBUILDER.COM)
Mon, 13 Jul 1998 21:24:00 +0100

For six years, as authors of the Costa Rican travel guide
The New to Key Costa Rica
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1569750718/ecotravelsinlatiA/)
we have been engaged in a "green-rating" project that gives
special recognition to eco-oriented lodgings that are practicing
successfully what we call "sustainable tourism". We originally initiated
the evaluation project when Costa Rica was in the first stages of its
tourism boom, because we wanted to promote establishments that embodied
our vision of how tourism should develop in Costa Rica. We wanted to do
what we could to help the tourist industry avoid the pitfalls of
traditional tourism.

Our evaluation focuses on three areas of operation: the environment, the
economy, and socioculture. Within the environmental criteria, we are
interested in the environmental impact of the place and use of energy and
natural resources. In the economy sector, we look at how much money stays
in the local community and how much flees to the country's capital or
international investors. And in the sociocultural section of our
evaluation, we are interested in how knowledgeable the owners are about
the local culture, and how they work to fortify it.

Four editions of our book (the 11th - 1993, the 12th - 1995, the
13th - 1997, and the 14th - forthcoming) include results of four respective
versions of our evaluation. As we learned more about how to carry out the
evaluation, we raised our response rate from 25% to almost 95% (by phoning
lodge owners/managers and setting up on-site evaluation interviews
coinciding with our visit to update the listing in the guide). For the
12th and 13th edition's survey, we sponsored the Masters Degree thesis by
a student in a local Ecotourism program; she designed many of the
questions on the interview, balanced them to weight environment and
economy/socioculture equally, and carried out and scored many of the
interviews. A Costa Rican forestry engineer with vast experience in the
field, Jane Segleau was an invaluable member of our team.

For the 14th edition's version, we relied on reader feedback and our own
observations during visits to all the lodges previously recognized, rather
than conducting another formal interview/inspection. During our visits
for the 13th edition, we had found that unless there was a change for the
worse in ownership or management of a lodging, its level of
"sustainability" usually improved over time.

The Costa Rican Tourism Institute is currently undertaking its own hotel
evaluation for sustainable tourism, which we are watching with hope and
curiousity. Their survey uses many of the same criteria as ours, but adds
the area of client education and satisfaction. The Tourism Institute has
been working on their certification program for three years and expects to
have the first results in July 1998. Ideally, we would like to let their
certification program replace ours, but we are waiting to see if the
results of their program truly have the effect of promoting sustainable
practices.

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The entire article and the authors' Hierarchy of Importance of Criteria for the New Key Sustainable Tourism Survey are found online the Eco Travels in Latin America website at http://www2.planeta.com/mader/planeta/0898/0898rating.html

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