Working With Travelife - Travelife for Accommodation

Travelife Certification can help a number of travel and tourism industry sectors improve their sustainability performance and better manage risk in their accommodation supply chain.

Travelife Certified properties must be actively working to improve their impact on the environment and the communities they operate in, whilst employing fair labour practices and proactively safeguarding human rights. By showing preference to certified accommodation in your purchasing policies and during the contracting process, you can show that your business is taking action on improving your own impacts.

Click here to read more about our certification requirements for accommodation providers and read on to find out how your sector can use Travelife as one of your sustainability management tools.

Airlines

By including a preference for Travelife Certified accommodation in your crew hotel contracts or policies, you can show that you are taking a wider and more proactive approach to improving your environmental and social impacts. In addition to the usual environmental requirements you would expect to see in a sustainability certification, our hotels must also regularly train their staff on how to identify and report any instances of child exploitation and abuse and address modern slavery risks, helping your business monitor both of these issues in your own supply chain. They must also proactively support their community and be committed to safeguarding human rights. Our team can help you establish a plan for encouraging the hotels you work with to become Travelife Certified.

Airports

Many airports are now working on improving their own sustainability credentials. By encouraging feeder hotels to obtain Travelife Certification, you can ensure you are taking a more holistic approach in terms of your wider footprint whilst offering your passengers sustainable accommodation options. Due to our requirements that hotels take action to safeguard children, prevent labour exploitation and to support their community, you can be confident that both environmental and social issues are being addressed. One of our team would be happy to help you with ideas about how to include Travelife as part of your sustainability strategy.

Attractions

If your attraction is looking to implement a sustainability strategy then addressing the environmental and social impacts of your onsite or feeder hotels should be considered. Encouraging hotels that you own or work with to obtain Travelife Certification will help to improve the overall footprint of your venue and give your visitors sustainable booking options.

Business Travel

We are continually hearing that businesses are taking more action on improving sustainbility through their own procurement policies, including their travel and MICE activities. Travelife offers a tool to ensure that they can select accommodation that has has their sustainability claims independently verified by a reputable international certification body. Our certification requirements also cover child safeguarding and modern slavery (bonded labour), helping businesses concerned about these issues ensure they are taking steps to address them.

If you are a TMC we think our Trade Support programme might work well for you and if you are a business that organises your own travel and events, you can contact us to find out more about how we can support you.

Cruise

Whilst we do not currently offer a cruise ship certification, Travelife Certification can help you improve your broader impacts in ports where passengers or crew may use shore accommodation. For example, we can support you with encouraging DMCs to have policies that give preference to certified properties and give you advice about how to do the same for any hotels that you contract directly.

Destinations

In many destinations the accommodation sector has perhaps the biggest impact on tourism in terms of employment, communities, resource consumption and the environment. Destinations concerned with improving the impacts of tourism should be looking to Travelife Ceritifcation as an important and reliable tool to improve these impacts. If the majority of your properties have our certification, you should start to see reduced emissions and better resource management from the sector. In addition to improved economic development opportunities for local businesses, your communities should see an improved experience of tourism. All of these should result in a better overall visitor experience.

Guided touring

We have developed Travelife Certification so that it is affordble and achieveable for any type or size of property, anywhere in the world. So whether you are offering coach tours of Europe or small group trips that go well off the beaten track, we can help you with ideas for increasing the number of certified properties in your portfolio, giving your customers more sustainable accommodation options that you know have been independently verified against a consistent international standard.

Tour Operators and DMCs

We already work with some of the largest European tour operators who use Travelife as a tool to improve their sustainability performance and to manage risk in their supply chain. Some tour operators add certification requirements to their accommodation contracts and work closely with us on communicating with their hotels and purchasing teams about how certification improves business for hotels and how our certification process works. Others simply use our list of certified properties to update their booking systems so that both sales staff and customers can quickly identify which hotels have independently verified sustainability credentials.

Our Trade Support programme provides an online portal where, depending on the level of support you sign-up for, you can access logos, the latest list of certified properties, e-learning and a range of other support materials.

Travel Agents and OTAs

Travel agents can look for the Travelife Certified mark in order to offer their customers more sustainable trips and if you are working through one of our tour operator partners you can ask them about the easiest way to do that. You can also sign up for our Trade Support programme (free for ABTA Members) so that you can access an online portal where you can access our logos, download our latest list of certified properties and read more about how to work with Travelife.