We all need to take responsibility for the sustainability challenges that lie ahead of us. By working together with our hotel and experience partners, we can take action to help shape a more sustainable future for tourism.

One of the ways our hotels and hotel partners do this is by achieving globally recognised sustainability certifications, demonstrating social and environmental good practice. Over the years many labels have been developed to help hotels manage sustainability. For consistency and quality, the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) has set a global standard for all certifications, called the GSTC Criteria. The Criteria are organised around four main themes: effective sustainability management, maximising social and economic benefits for the local community, enhancing cultural heritage, and reducing negative impacts to the environment.

To ensure high standards, TUI mandates hotels to achieve certifications aligned with the GSTC Criteria in hotel accommodation contracts. Currently over 30 standards have achieved GSTC recognition status, such as Travelife, Green Key, Green Globe, EarthCheck and Biosphere. By carefully managing their impacts on local people, economies and habitats, each hotel is uniquely positioned to make a positive difference for the whole community. We have found our most sustainably managed hotels also consistently deliver reduced costs, better environmental performance, and higher customer satisfaction. We delivered over 54 million holidays to hotels certified as sustainable between 2015 to 2022. In 2022, we had 7.9 m customers staying in a hotel certified to a GSTC-recognised label standard. We will maintain our focus on certification as an effective tool to raise the sustainability bar across the industry, as well as work with industry standards to strengthen their sustainability criteria and roll out higher standards for our own hotels. By 2030 we aim to send 16 million customers a year to hotels which are certified as sustainable.

Through experiences and activities, our customers discover new places and contribute to the local economy. By working together with our experience partners, we believe that we can create more sustainable experiences, beneficial for all. We have embedded sustainability criteria into our differentiated excursions and delivered 6 million experiences with sustainability at their heart between 2015 to 2022. We will continue to build on this progress.

Our differentiated experiences give guests a true taste of each destination while meeting specific criteria for sustainability, e.g. suppliers must manage their environmental impacts, include visits to protected areas or cultural attractions on their excursions where possible, offer local cuisine and the opportunity to buy local products. Furthermore, fair employment practices, the protection of children and animal welfare guidelines must be ensured. 

In 2022 we applied the GSTC Criteria to individual tours and activities in order to assess their sustainability performance, the first tourism company in the world to do so. In 2022, 180 TUI Collection experiences have gone through this comprehensive process to meet global sustainability standards in destinations such as mainland Spain, Mallorca, the Canaries, Turkey and the Dominican Republic. By 2023, TUI aims for all TUI Collection experiences to meet global sustainability standards. TUI Collection is our own-branded portfolio of experiences available in over 100 destinations.