Gold Award!!!
We are thrilled to announce our recent achievement of the prestigious Gold award for Green Tourism at our first assessment. This accolade recognises our unwavering commitment to sustainable and eco-friendly practices. Additionally, we are proud to have been named finalists in both the Highlands & Islands Thistle Awards and the Scottish Business Environment Awards, highlighting our dedication to excellence, innovation and sustainability in the tourism industry.
Green Tourism
Green Tourism has been at the forefront of championing sustainable tourism for more than 27 years and is a world-leading sustainability certification for travel, tourism and hospitality businesses. The organisation aims to help embed responsible, sustainable and environmentally friendly practices across businesses and the wider tourism sector.
We had to provide evidence of what we were doing towards the three main goals for sustainability – People, Place and Planet. The submission took quite a while to compile as we wanted to provide as much evidence as we could and it was well worth it! We scored 80% in the audit and achieved GOLD at our first assessment. We’ve now got an action plan to follow up on what we’ve already done.
Highlands and Islands Thistle Awards 2024
For 2024 there are 16 Awards up for grabs covering the various facets of the customer / visitor experience of our tourism industry. The winners will be announced at the prestigious Awards Ceremony and Dinner which will take place on Friday 4th October at the Kingsmills Hotel, in the capital and heart of the Highlands, Inverness.
These regional awards work in partnership with the Scottish Thistle Awards. Each category winner, with the exception of the Highland Ambassador, will automatically become a finalist at the Scottish Thistle Awards National Final in November. We’ve been shortleeted in the category of Climate Action. For this we had to describe why we thought we should get an award and then had a zoom session with three judges. All very nerve-wracking! We’re looking forward to a night out in Inverness in October and the Kingsmills Hotel is one of our favourite places for a wee break away from Dornie.
Scottish Business Environment Awards
If you read our other blog post about our journey towards net zero, you’ll know that we took part in the Climate Springboard programme sponsored by Royal Bank of Scotland and delivered by the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute. One of the advisers suggested that we enter the VIBES Awards to tell others our story so that’s what we did and we were delighted to be named as finalists.
This week, we had a visit from the panel of judges who spent about 90 minutes asking various questions about what we do, why we do it and what difference it makes. It sounds like a grilling but it was actually really enjoyable and we get some very helpful advice. We’re in the Best New Business and the awards are in Glasgow on Tuesday 12th November so we hope you’ll be cheering us on. Regardless of whether we win or not,we’ll be delighted to be there.
Green Tourism Scorecard and Highlights
We thought you might be interested to learn more about how Green Tourism works and so here’s a copy of our scoreboard. You’ll see that we’ve got most work to do on the Planet Goals and the report we were given suggests how we can make changes for the better on water and waste as these were the two lowest scoring categories (65% and 67%). We’ll need help from our guests with this so we’re trying to think of different ways to encourage our guests to be our partners in being more sustainable. Any ideas from you will be very welcome!!