The aim of the report Visit England has commissioned ICRT to write is to encourage companies that do good sustainability work to not be shy about communicating it, and to understand the value it can have in engaging with customers before, during and after their trip. We aren’t looking at communicating sustainability as a separate aspect of normal business, but how it can be integrated, mostly implicitly but possibly also explicitly, in the way you market and communicate.
This responds to the requests from certified companies to have more marketing benefits from being certified, and also the research done by Visit England on businesses being shy about communicating what they do, for fear it seems patronising or too worthy.
The report will be delivered in April 2010, after market testing at Best of Britain and Ireland at Olympia in March 2010. The first training events using this toolkit are already booked for the Brecon Beacons National Park, and for Eden Project, in April 2010.