How to participate?
In the last ten years more than 5000 tourism businesses and also some destinations have received one or more eco-certificates or awards. During this time 1000s of experts at universities, consultancies, NGOs and other initiatives have created a lot of knowledge on all sustainability aspects in tourism. These processes have happened at local, regional, national and international levels. Through the VESTAS, Vision on Sustainable Tourism and DestiNet aim to bring together all the certification and awarding systems and to use the knowledge and experience of this mass of expertise to produce a European-level ´award of awards` that also awards the efforts of other potentially award-winning certified businesses. The participation procedure will accordingly include following steps:
The nomination form can be found at:
http://destinet.eu/tools/fol703514/fol588962/travelmoledestinet-sustainable-tourism-awards/VESTAs_Nomination_Form.xls
How the VESTAS is organising the participation process?
Step 1: Nomination
VESTAS will invite all country-level tourism management organisations and more than 50 certificates and awards for sustainable tourism, plus development NGOs to nominate best practice examples to nominate up to 3 businesses in each category. All nominees will be profiled on a green Sustainable Tourism Map of Europe (http://destinet.ew.eea.europa.eu/portal_map/).
Step 2: Application
VESTAS will contact and invite the nominated businesses and destinations to agree on their nomination and to fill out an entry form.
Step3: Judging the Applicants
VESTAS will invite a minimum of 1000 experts across Europe to rate the applications, using the DestiNet polling system. The European network for sustainable tourism development ECOTRANS will serve as the core group of experts, who will be augmented by networks of experts from administrators, universities, certification bodies, and the industry representatives themselves. The highest ratings will then be presented to an international jury. The jury will make a final selection of a top three best practice examples based on the poll results.
FAQs
What’s different about the VESTAS compared to other tourism awards?
The VESTAS is an ´award of awards and certification processes` at the European level, bringing together a wide range of top-class best practice sustainable tourism examples from the whole tourism supply chain, covering all types of European landscapes.
Who can submit nominations?
Can an individual business or destination nominate itself?
Yes. If a business or destination has received a eco-certificate or prize then it can contact us directly and inform us of the certification or awarding body and ask to be nominated.
When will the nomination process start?
1st July 2010.
Will the internal rating results be published?
The rating is an internal process to identify those applications which the European experts altogether consider to be best, and comments will be publicly visible to the 1000 plus tourism experts, but not to the general public.
Will there be only 1 winner per category?
No. All participants already have certain characteristics that positively contribute to Sustainable Tourism. Nomination itself is seen as an achievement. The result of the rating will have a group of 3 top-rated applications in one category or sub-category.
How to participate
