Sustainable tourism
capability program
An industry-leading capability program that supports tourism businesses to progress sustainability across their business operations and experience design.
why sustainability matters...
For tourism businesses to remain competitive in the national and global market, they must transition quickly to more sustainable business operations.
From a market perspective, the post-pandemic era for travel sees an increasingly conscious traveller, shaping demand for low-carbon footprint travel and experience options that touch the earth and communities lightly. Whilst there still remains a 'say-do' gap between demand and conversion for sustainable experiences, those businesses who convert to sustainable business operations will be in the box seat when sustainable tourism becomes the norm, especially as the socially and environmentally-conscious Gen-Z market begins to travel more extensively as adults.
From a supply perspective, the travel distribution system is increasingly requiring tourism businesses to demonstrate their sustainability credentials, while the new European Green Claims directive will require any Australian business that is making sustainability claims to have globally recognised sustainability accreditations to avoid prosecution of greenwashing.
This means that all tourism businesses who want to engage and work with international travel trade will need to urgently accelerate and verify their sustainability credentials to remain competitive.
What is the Government doing to support the transition?
The Federal Government's recently launched National Sustainability Framework for the Visitor Economy and Sustainable Tourism Toolkit which sets the national vision and priorities to progress sustainability in the tourism sector, and recognises sustainable tourism is central to the visitor economy’s future success.
These tools are extremely comprehensive, and support businesses who are on in the early stages of their sustainability journey, with helpful definitions, checklists and inspiration to demonstrate what is possible.
How do we help tourism businesses get started with Sustainability?
Transitioning to sustainable business operations, and crafting sustainable tourism experiences can be viewed as a very time-consuming and costly exercise for established businesses.
Reconciling these barriers, understanding the market and regulatory environment, supporting industry to understand sustainability as a mindset, and inspiring change through sharing solutions and case studies is the focus of our capability programs.
How the program Works
We have strong and reputable subject-matter knowledge and two years of experience delivering quality learning programs that have changed hearts and minds when it comes to progressing sustainable tourism outcomes.
Our Sustainable tourism capability program aims to:
- Simplify the narrative around sustainability in a non-intimidating way
- Cut through the jargon and only deliver practical inspiration and ideas, focussing on the 'how to' rather than more theory.
- Provide achievable, incremental, practical ideas that can be applied in businesses in a way that is environmentally, socially and economically beneficial without putting pressure on your time or budget.
Sustainable Tourism Workshop
The Workshop is a half-day learning opportunity that covers foundation concepts to build business resilience and understand how to apply sustainability across all areas of their business, innovating their current or new visitor experience, and how to evolve their business operations to create a greater positive impact within their local community, ecosystem and visitors.
Positive Impact Learning Tours
One of the best ways to progress change, is to inspire hearts and minds, and see and hear from a colleague in their local area who are already applying a new learning or concept.
We’ve evolved the tourism famil concept to deliver Positive Impact Learning Tours across regional Australia to galvanise learning, connection and positive social impact.
The Positive Impact Learning Tour aims to build on the learnings of the workshop, foster deeper conversations, get firsthand exposure to positive impact in action, as well as connect with local suppliers, conservation or social impact organisations in their part of the region.
Individual Mentoring
Each business that participates in a Program can undertake individual mentoring sessions to accelerate their transition to more sustainable business operations and towards meeting national and global sustainable business standards and accredditations.
Mentoring will provide individual guidance, accountability and support to help them apply their new learnings.
Attendees left with great energy and ideas about what they could implement immediately and an understanding of how to develop their businesses into the future.
TiCSA was extremely pleased to bring Tourism Collective’s ‘The why, what and how of running a sustainable and regenerative tourism business’ to SA’s tourism industry in Adelaide. Informed by his deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities faced by small tourism businesses in seeking to be more sustainable, Nic delivered a highly engaging and practical workshop. Attendees left with great energy and ideas about what they could implement immediately and an understanding of how to develop their businesses into the future.
The 2023 Sustainable Tourism Program provided by Grampians Tourism in conjunction with the Tourism Collective presented some really insightful new ideas and thought provoking concepts.
It opened up a new pathway to collaborate with other local business and inspired me to introduce some positive changes across multiple businesses.
PARTICIPANT OUTCOMES
After the Workshop & Larning Tour, participants will have the following tangible business planning tools and outcomes:
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Clearly Articulated Business Values
Have a set of core values that will help to articulate their purpose and help them to align their decision-making across all facets of their business.
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Business sustainability ideas and tools to implement
Participants will have completed hands-on activities throughout the workshop resulting in many new ideas to apply in their business.
Businesses have exposure and access to tools for implementation and impact measurement to implement.
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New Positive Impact Experience & Giving Back Partnership Ideas
They will have fresh ideas around developing or enhancing their visitor experience that delivers a positive impact on their community and environment.
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New connections & partnerships with other tourism businesses
Participants will enjoy the opportunity to network with other businesses and organisations to explore opportunities collaboration, and also with potential ongoing accountability partnerships.
If they undertake individual mentoring, they will also:
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Have developed their own Positive Impact Plan for their business
Participants will be planning actions to progress sustainability across short and medium term, and planning for funding and action for long term goals.
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Confidently pursue the most relevant Sustainability Accredditation
Mentoring will support participants to confidently assess and decide on the most appropriate accreditation to frame their commitment to their Positive Impact Plan. This includes a monitoring and measurement framework to track the progress towards the accredditation.
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New Positive Impact Experience & Giving Back Partnership locked and loaded
Participants will have a positive impact experience, or local giving back partnership in-train, or at least initiated to be up and running in the coming 12 months.
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Confidently tell their positive impact story with their community & guests
Participants will have the ideas to capture and confidently communicate their positive impact story, on their website and social media - so that visitors and locals know about their commitment to sustainability.
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Confidence to apply a sustainability mindset long term
Participants will have the knowledge and tools to confidently apply a sustainability mindset across all business decisions in the future. They understand that it's progress over perfection, and make incremental changes to achieve their Positive Impact Plan.
DESTINATION OUTCOMES
This learning opportunity will not only support businesses to build sustainable and resilient enterprises, but it also supports your destination organisation to:
- Learn about how you can implement a sustainable and regenerative mindset across their Organisation (be it a local council, regional or local tourism organisation, visitor centre, etc)
- Open up the conversation with tourism businesses in your region about where they are at with their sustainability journey
- Helps to uncover some core challenges that require advocacy support at a regional/destination level
- Increase the number of sustainable businesses that can be showcased through marketing initiatives in the region, which can generate demand from new, values-aligned markets.
- Identify further gaps in capability across the industry, to continue to build a resilient tourism industry.
I have a whole page of notes to refer to & help plan our own sustainable & regenerative tourism journey!
Having Nic present and use his own business as a case study was really engaging and his level of knowledge and expertise on sustainable tourism was outstanding. I have a whole page of notes to refer to & help plan our own sustainable & regenerative tourism journey.
PROGRAM CASE STUDIES
investigate this opportunity for your destination
If you're interested in supporting your tourism businesses' in your destination to progress their sustainable tourism journey, then we'd love to hear from you.