Focus on the VESTAS number 8: BIO HOTELS & GREEN TRAVEL CLUB

BioHotels General Meeting

BIO HOTELS, Green Travel Club and ECO HOTEL CERTIFIED are three of the first European certification agencies to join with the VESTAS and nominate their chosen members for a 2011 VESTA award

In this eighth focus on the VESTAS: Vision European Sustainable Tourism Awards BIO HOTELS, Green Travel Club and ECO HOTEL CERTIFIED introduce themselves and their aims
The first VESTA winners will be announced at ITB Berlin in 2011 at the Responsible Tourism Networking event on Friday 11 March.

20 of the approximately 30 eligible certification agencies have now partnered with the VESTA awards.

Organic network Team – Doris Möhsl – Ludwig Gruber – Debora Carrer – Ron Schmid

Doris Mohsl of BIOHOTELS, Green Travel Club and ECO HOTEL CERTIFIED talks to Valere Tjolle of Vision on Sustainable Tourism:

Valere Tjolle: Could you give me the full name of your certifications and their history (when did they start? Who are the guiding team and what do they do?)
Doris Mohsl: BIO-Hotels is an association of more than 70 hotels mainly in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy who are working 100% certified organic in F&B and cosmetics (very, very few exceptions allowed until the end of this year).

Back in 2001 12 hotel owners came together and discussed the idea of forming a group, mainly focused on supporting each other in this niche market.

At that point we created standards: the goal was always to go 100% organic in  F&B. Than we looked for inspection agencies who would certify those standards. Now all hotels are certified organic by the national/local certification agencies.

Ludwig Gruber (now manager of BIO-Hotels) was initially still working at Ernteverband Austria, the Austrian association for organic farmers. He quit his job about a year after founding of BIO-Hotels to work full time on that project.

I, myself, was a founding member and a board member, due to the fact that I owned a Biohotel myself. Now I am a freelance for BIO-Hotels and am the international contact and coordinator.
BIO-Hotels has now a board of 4 members. They agree every year on the standards and implement new standards – if needed – based on the wishes of the other members. The national inspection agency (like the Soil Associaton in UK) will than get the new updated standards and the member hotels will be controllled accordingly.

Green-travelclub (GTC) started in June 2010. The team, consisting of Ludwig Gruber, Doris Möhsl, Ron Schmid and Debora Carrer have developed this platform. The positioning in the travel market is to be the only green direct booking platform.

ECO HOTELS CERTIFIED started in may 2010. The founders are AbCert in Germany (biggest German inspection agency) and Organic Network inc (which is our company: owned by Ludwig Gruber, Ron Schmid, Doris Möhsl and Debora Carrer)

We decided together upon the standards and the main contact people and developers are Ron Schmid and Uwe Bach from AbCert.

AbCert controls the data and the standards of the hotels once a year!

VT: What organisations are certified? Where are they? and what are they certified for?
DM: In order to be presented on www. greentravelclub.info is to fulfil the standards of www.ecohotelscertified.info. Those will be controlled by an official inspection body of each country and in Germany from AbCert.

ECO HOTELS CERTIFIED are NOT organizations only individual hotels and they are certified for Quality and use of resources (Energy, water, waste management). Very important is that EHC is a benchmark system which forces the member hotels to look at their usage of resources every year and adapt accordingly.

VT: In your view, what has your and other certification programmes achieved so far and what have they failed to achieve?
DM: The BIO-Hotels management team has tried to implement environmental standards over the past 3 years, but failed to do that until last November.
As far as Green Travel Club is concerned we are too new to say what we have accomplished or failed off so far. In comparison to other eco standards ours is modern and dynamic!
Now all BIO-Hotels have an additional standard, which is an additional certification called EHC (www.ecohotelscertified.info).

BIO-Hotels is the only organization worldwide that does really commit to 100% organic in F&B and cosmetics – something no other association has done so far, because of that BIO-Hotels has become a strong and trustworthy trade.

EHC is the only certification program that has a benchmark system. The hotel will see were his level of CO2 is and has the chance to raise his standard or (worst case scenario) can not reach the standards of the other hotels (by 50% over the average carbon food print per bed) – than the hotel will have 6 month to implement solutions to reduce their carbon footprint and will be controlled again.

VT: Which best practices have you nominated for the VESTAS and why?
DM: We are nominating the following:
Gutshaus Stellshagen, Theiners Garten, Balance
Seminarhotel Retter, L’Aubier, Grafenast, Antik Zeytin Bio Hotel

VT:  If you had one wish, what should happen in 2011 to support your certification programme in making tourism more sustainable?
DM: Because the association is so dynamic in their approach and handing, many other hotel owners are drawn to us and motivated to up their own standards and go for 100% organic.
And for Green Travel Club we would like many more new hotels in order to provide a wide range of certified green hotels to our costumers.
 

Details of the VESTAS are HERE

Valere Tjolle

Valere Tjolle is editor of the Sustainable Tourism Report Suite 2011 latest special offer at: www.travelmole.com/stories/1146228.php