Abstract
Attempts to promoting sustainable tourism and ecotourism as qualityproducts suffer from the lack of methods to ensure these are
not just a green wash. The current proliferation of awards, labels and endorsements has confused consumers to the extent of
preferring to ignore these green messages. Several initiatives have emerged to address the proliferation of small, little known, limited
value ecolabels in tourism and hospitality, and to ensure that the larger ones meet internationally accepted criteria. This paper will
review progress made bya wide range of public, private and non-profit agencies in developing environmental standards and method
to measure them, which will be set against the internationallyagreed process for compliance assessment. From the above
experiences, the author will outline the prospects to environmental certification in tourism and hospitality, which are the
development of an international accreditation system, following agreed standards, and linked to national, regional or sector-specific
certification programmes. r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.