On 9th September 2020, a training sessions about Sustainability Tourism Management was delivered to several tourist agents of the Tourism Sector of Kazakhstan, within the framework of SUSTOUKA Project. This online meeting introduced sustainability management to several employees of hotels and tour operators of the country. At a later date, this webinar will be complemented with a weekly course about sustainability management for the employees of the different tourist agents.
The objective of this webinar was to provide a basic understanding of sustainability management and serve as a teaser for the following courses about sustainable management. First, the definition of sustainable tourism by The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) was presented, and how to interlink sustainability with other sectors and concepts, such as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Triple Bottom Line.
According to UNWTO, Sustainable Tourism is defined as: “Tourism that takes full account of its current and future economic, social and environmental impacts, addressing the needs of visitors, the industry, the environment and host communities”.
Then, the impacts of tourism and their reduction through a correct Sustainable Management plan were addressed during this part of the webinar, the participants of the session received and introduction to how tourism companies should work toward sustainability and the benefits they can achieved through it: brand and image enlargement, cost reduction, productivity improvement, employees´ satisfaction, and local nature and cultural heritage preservation. In order to give evidence of these benefits, several examples of successful cases of organizations were shown.
At the last part of the webinar, information about Travelife sustainability certification system and sustainability business training was provided.
