TOURISM authorities in Turkey are working with the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) on a groundbreaking programme to achieve sustainability certification for all the country’s hotels.

A GSTC conference recently convened in Antalya with the project already underway, with hundreds of auditors trained to verify hotels operate to GSTC-recognised standards and hundreds more on the way.

The government-sanctioned programme is mandatory for Turkey’s 22,000 hotels, with all required to meet GSTC standards in a series of stages. GSTC criteria are recognised as the global standards for sustainability in travel and tourism. Up to now, no more than a few thousand hotels worldwide have been certified to these.

CEO Randy Durband said: “This is a big effort. An entire country is pushing its hotels towards certification. We need an army of certifiers, so we’ve moved aggressively to train certifiers and verifiers.”

He explained: “We’ve partnered with Cappadocia University and trained two groups – a smaller group of full auditors and a larger group of verifiers. We’re trying to get 150 fully trained auditors for the full certification.” The GSTC had previously trained about 100 auditors in total, while the programme could require up to 1,000 trained verifiers.

Durband noted: “These are people with years of auditing experience in other sectors. We don’t teach them auditing, we teach them the GSTC criteria.”

Stage one of the programme requires compliance with 14 GSTC criteria, stage two compliance with 28, and stage three full certification.

Elif Balci Fisunoglu, vice-general manager at the Turkey tourism promotion and development agency TGA, said: “We’ll put sustainability promotion at the core of our marketing. By the end of 2023 we aim for all categories of accommodation to meet 14 of the GSTC criteria.”

Durband added: “Each stage is a significant step. We’ve not set a timeline for stage two, but it will be a couple of years.”

GSTC assurance programme director Mihee Kang said one of the aims is “to inspire other destinations”, saying: “All the hotels have to satisfy 14 criteria by next year. It’s a huge demand. There are no shortcuts.”