The UNWTO event “Energy solutions for hotels” at Fitur (Madrid’s tourism fair) was a timely reminder of the long road ahead to reducing CO2 emissions in the hotel industry. Most of what the 23 speakers covered in 5 hours has been evolving for a decade, and yet the sector (and particularly small firms) have failed to change their behaviour. Why?

The business case made for energy management is eco-savings- yet none of the presenters showed return on investment periods that would be sufficiently tempting. Instead each speaker went off on different directions to present less focused reasons for behaviour change, with few showing a product that is more experiential as a result.

The greatest disappointment did however come from the floor- from a maximum audience of 150, half the room was empty and this worsened as the event progressed. This first ever Fitur event on sustainable tourism failed to capture the attention of industry in a way that WTM and more recently ITB have.

www.hotelenergysolutions.net is set to be however a valuable tool for hotels aiming to reduce their operational costs, and the UNWTO plans a second and final event at Fitur in January 2011 to conclude their three year project. My concern is that we seem to have failed to understand how and why small businesses take decisions and what can contribute to positive behaviour change.

Presentations will be available on the UNTWO project’s website

I (Lucy McCombes) have recently returned from speaking at a conference in Sofia, Bulgaria on The Business Case for Responsible Tourism. I was invited to attend by the organisers, the Bulgarian Business Leaders Forum who we have been working with to submit a EU funding proposal to support a network of organisations in Eastern Europe wanting to take a more responsible approach to tourism development.

The conference was successful in bringing a range of stakeholders together and it was a very interesting insight into the experience of trying to deliver responsible tourism in the face of some serious challenges. On the second day three developers who are working on ski, sea and golf resorts were put under the spotlight by the “international experts” to answer questions on what they were doing in practice in terms of responsible tourism which led to vibrant debate.

During the conference the Bulgarian Association of Alternative Tourism (www.baatbg.org) and Odysseia-In Travel Agency (www.odysseia-in.com) were very welcoming and kindly took the time to show me a few sites of Sofia. They are doing a lot of great work on the ground in rural and mountain areas which is well worth taking a look at. All in all the conference was a great opportunity to start to get to know our Bulgarian partners in person and hopefully we will be hearing more from them in the future.

Former ICRT student, Veronica Tonge, who has founded www.responsibleskiing.com, also went down very well as there was a great deal of discussion about how skiing can be made responsible and she made some useful contacts who were interested in her work in this area.

On the last day I was lucky enough to have some time being a tourist in Sofia which included stopping off at the Russian market outside the Sveta Nedelya Cathedral to buy a painting of an icon….I chose St Christopher – the patron saint of travel! (see photograph)