The Seychelles Sustainable Tourism Label is moving forward!
Further to our signing of the MOU with Fair Trade Tourism in July of this year, we are pleased to announce the next step towards international recognition for our label.
We will soon be applying for recognition with the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC). The GSTC is the leading organization which establishes and manages global sustainable standards with the aim of increasing sustainable tourism knowledge and practices among public and private stakeholders. What this means for our standard and all our certified hotels is that we will benefit from:
- International credibility
- Our SSTL standard being promoted via the GSTC website
- Individual certified hotels being included in a GSTC index that will be promoted to online travel agencies (OTAs) including BookDifferent.com, HotelBeds.com, BookGreener.com, and Glooby.com (other OTAs are being added on a quarterly basis); and offline to various travel providers to use for purposes of preferential buying
- Our SSTL Certified hotels will be included in a GSTC directory on its website
- Qualification for GSTC-Approval of the certification program
- Announcement of achievement in GSTC newsletter, GSTC website and GSTC social media outlets
In our endeavour to qualify for recognition, we have amended our criteria to align them to that of the GSTC. Attached is the amended criteria as well as a summary of amendments for your ease of reference. Note that certification with The SSTL is still very much accessible as no major changes have had to be done for us to qualify for this. All new applicants and hotels up for recertification will need to meet our revised criteria as applicable at the time of (re)assessment.
For more information on the GSTC, please visit www.gstcouncil.org