CRITERIA FOR ECO CERTIFICATION OF TOURIST ACCOMMODATION: SUSTAINABILITY REFLECTIONS AND CONSUMERS' PREFERENCES

摘要

The EU ecolabel for accommodation is a voluntary scheme designed to encourage businesses to market goods and services with a reduced impact on the environment and to help consumers - including public and private purchasers - to identify them easily. The eco-certification for accommodation has become an important instrument used for greening the tourism sectors, through the implication of policy makers, who created the legal framework, tourism operators, who made the efforts of adopting the certification, and consumers, who's environmental and ethical concerns represented one of the main drivers for the adoption of sustainable practices by hotels. The paper presents a brief comparison between two certification schemes from two different parts of the world (European Union and Australia), in order to highlight the diversity of measures that can be taken for responding to sustainability challenges.