Thank you to everyone who joined the Sustainability Summit at LATA Expo yesterday morning. We have summarised the key discussion points of both sessions and hope it was informative and thought-provoking, but also interesting.
Our thanks to LATA’s Megan Parkinson, head of sustainability and impact, and Anne-Kathrin Zschiegner, director of the Long Run
Destination Stewardship: A Collaborative Approach
Maria Fernanda Leiton – Costa Rica Tourism Board
Manuel Butler – Spanish Tourist Office
Jen Jones – Galapagos Conservation Trust
Gonzalo Undurraga, Explora
Destination Management in Costa Rica:
Costa Rica has implemented a destination management program with 33 development centres across the country. These are planned collaboratively with local stakeholders and focus on social programs, infrastructure, and tourism growth. Five-year plans are created in partnership with local communities, ensuring that locals adopt and own the tourism development strategies.
Use of Wellbeing Indicators:
Costa Rica uses a framework of 12 social and environmental indicators to measure the impact of tourism on communities. This includes a detailed questionnaire distributed across 478 districts, gathering insights from over 22,000 people.
Tangible Benefits from Tourism:
Results show tourism significantly improves local wellbeing, employment, and community development, with measurable increases in wellbeing scores.
Collaboration as a Core Principle:
All participants emphasized the necessity of multi-stakeholder collaboration — including governments, private sector, and NGOs — to ensure sustainable and effective tourism strategies.
Private Sector’s Role in Conservation:
Businesses operating in tourism (e.g., in Chile and Easter Island) are actively managing conservation areas, reforestation, and collaborating with national authorities to protect the environment.
Overcoming the “Someone Else’s Problem” Mindset:
A recurring barrier to collaboration is the belief that sustainability is someone else’s responsibility. The speakers stressed that leadership and purpose-driven action are key to overcoming this.
Purpose-Driven Organizations Attract Talent:
Young professionals increasingly seek employers who are mission-aligned and socially responsible. Tourism businesses with a clear purpose are more likely to attract and retain talent.
Science + Community = Effective Conservation:
Conservation NGOs, like those in the Galápagos, emphasized that successful conservation requires combining scientific expertise with local community input to develop implementable, accepted solutions.
Tourists as Agents of Change:
Tourists should be seen as active participants in sustainability, not just passive consumers. Proper education and messaging before, during, and after their trips can transform them into allies for conservation and cultural respect.
Collaborative Metrics – Unifying Data for a Sustainable Future
Joanna Bunker – Travalyst
Kasia Morgan – Exodus
Chris Ellis – Explore Worldwide
Quinn Meyer – CREES
Data Overload & Inconsistency Is a Major Challenge
Tourism companies face increasing demands for sustainability data from various stakeholders. However, overlapping and inconsistent data requests create inefficiencies, confusion, and make it hard to derive meaningful insights.
Purpose of Data Collection Varies Widely
Organizations collect sustainability data for different reasons: internal benchmarking, compliance, certifications, partnerships, marketing, and reporting. This leads to fragmented efforts and lack of standardization.
Collaborative Supplier Engagement Is Essential
Operators like Exodus and Explore work closely with DMCs (Destination Management Companies) and suppliers to ensure data collection is meaningful. Key efforts include offering benchmarking feedback and aligning data requests with supplier capabilities.
Regulation Is Driving Change, Slowly
Looming regulations like CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) in Europe are prompting companies to prepare for mandatory disclosures, though uncertainty remains about timelines and exact requirements.
Data Helps Drive Emission Reduction Goals
Explore, for instance, uses data to track emissions and progress toward net-zero targets, relying on a third-party tool (e.g., ecollective) to measure emissions from operations, transport, meals, and accommodations.
Accommodation Providers Face Unique Hurdles
Small-scale accommodations often lack the time, tools, or motivation to collect sustainability data. Challenges include lack of staff capacity, poor access to utility data, and overlapping survey requests from multiple clients.
Local Context Is Often Overlooked
Data requests are often developed with a Western, top-down mindset and don’t consider local realities or priorities. This leads to poor engagement and irrelevant metrics for many local businesses.
Storytelling & Trust Are Central to Making Data Useful
Data alone isn’t enough. For it to build trust and inspire action, it must be part of a narrative that connects businesses, travellers, and communities. Data should inform storytelling and reinforce transparency.
Travelyst’s Role: Scaling Data Through Standardization
Travelyst, a sustainability data hub backed by major companies (e.g., Google, Booking.com), works to standardise and distribute data at scale—starting with aviation and now moving into accommodations.
Progress Over Perfection—Collaboration Is Key
All panellists agreed that perfection is not the goal; progress and collaboration are. Standardizing data requests, aligning goals, and being transparent are crucial steps to making tourism more sustainable.