Green Tourism started in Scotland in 1997, at a time when sustainability was still a fringe concern in business — associated with campaigning rather than commercial common sense, and largely unsupported by affordable technology or public awareness. The idea behind the Green Tourism Standard was simple but, for its time, genuinely contrarian: that ordinary, practical, cost-saving good practice could be made accessible to every tourism business, not just the largest or most idealistic, and grounded from the outset in the emerging ISO 14001 environmental management framework.

Over the following three decades, the case for that idea has been made for us. Society’s expectations of sustainability have shifted from a niche interest to a mainstream one, then to a baseline, and now to a matter of proof rather than promise: ESG has become boardroom language, green-claims regulation now requires exactly the kind of independent, audited verification the Green Tourism Standard has used from day one, and today’s traveller expects the businesses they book with to be able to show their credentials, not just state them. Alongside that shift, the industry itself has weathered a run of serious challenges — from foot-and-mouth disease and the global financial crisis to the near-total shutdown of the COVID-19 pandemic and repeated energy-price shocks — each of which has, if anything, strengthened the case for the efficiency, resilience and independently verified good practice at the heart of the Standard.

Green Tourism has invested continuously to stay ahead of that changing landscape rather than simply keep pace with it: moving certification from an in-person, on-site visit to a remote and then fully digital assessment; building one of the sector’s only purpose-built carbon measurement tools; and reorganising the certification criteria around the Environmental, Social and Governance structure that businesses, investors and regulators now use to talk about sustainability. The result is a Standard that has consistently anticipated where the industry was heading rather than reacted to it after the fact — helping the businesses that hold it identify real opportunities, manage real risk, and future-proof themselves against whatever the next thirty years bring. Thirty years on, the ethos remains what it was at the start: sustainability that is proven, not promised, and accessible to everyone from a single-room bed and breakfast to an international hotel group.

Green Tourism Certified is the scheme owner and standards agency behind the Green Tourism Standard, founded by Andrea Nicholas and operating as a company separate from Green Business UK Ltd. Drawing on close to three decades of sector experience, it develops and maintains the certification criteria, sets the requirements for certification, operations and delivery, and defines the standards that auditors and the auditing process must meet. The criteria are reviewed and updated roughly every five years to keep pace with the industry, with the next version, V8, about to launch. For details on the Standard, see this page.

Green Business UK Ltd is the independent company responsible for auditing, operations and delivery of Green Tourism certification, established in 2002 to keep assessment separate from the standards agency that sets the criteria. Its auditing team is trained to IEMA (Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment) standards, with processes aligned with ISO 17065, the international standard for certification bodies. Green Business UK Ltd also manages GreenCheck, the online auditing platform that guides businesses through certification with a modular, step-by-step approach, before a hard-lock stage passes their completed submission through to the auditing team for formal assessment. Alongside the audit team, a dedicated customer service team supports businesses at every stage of their certification journey — from a first enquiry, through gathering evidence and preparing for assessment, to achieving and renewing their award — making the path to certification as clear and straightforward as the Standard itself.