Hotel Ratings/Planeta.com

Reflections on "Green Ratings"
by Anne Becher and Beatrice Blake

August 1998

For six years, as authors of the Costa Rican travel guide The New to Key Costa Rica, we have been engaged in a "green-rating" project that gives special recognition to eco-oriented lodgings that are practicing successfully what we call "sustainable tourism". We originally initiated the evaluation project when Costa Rica was in the first stages of its tourism boom, because we wanted to promote establishments that embodied our vision of how tourism should develop in Costa Rica. We wanted to do what we could to help the tourist industry avoid the pitfalls of traditional tourism.

Our evaluation focuses on three areas of operation: the environment, the economy, and socioculture. Within the environmental criteria, we are interested in the environmental impact of the place and use of energy and natural resources. In the economy sector, we look at how much money stays in the local community and how much flees to the country's capital or international investors. And in the sociocultural section of our evaluation, we are interested in how knowledgeable the owners are about the local culture, and how they work to fortify it.

Four editions of our book (the 11th - 1993, the 12th - 1995, the 13th - 1997, and the 14th - forthcoming) include results of four respective versions of our evaluation. As we learned more about how to carry out the evaluation, we raised our response rate from 25% to almost 95% (by phoning lodge owners/managers and setting up on-site evaluation interviews coinciding with our visit to update the listing in the guide). For the 12th and 13th edition's survey, we sponsored the Masters Degree thesis by a student in a local Ecotourism program; she designed many of the questions on the interview, balanced them to weight environment and economy/socioculture equally, and carried out and scored many of the interviews. A Costa Rican forestry engineer with vast experience in the field, Jane Segleau was an invaluable member of our team.

For the 14th edition's version, we relied on reader feedback and our own observations during visits to all the lodges previously recognized, rather than conducting another formal interview/inspection. During our visits for the 13th edition, we had found that unless there was a change for the worse in ownership or management of a lodging, its level of "sustainability" usually improved over time.

The Costa Rican Tourism Institute is currently undertaking its own hotel evaluation for sustainable tourism, which we are watching with hope and curiousity. Their survey uses many of the same criteria as ours, but adds the area of client education and satisfaction. The Tourism Institute has been working on their certification program for three years and expects to have the first results in July 1998. Ideally, we would like to let their certification program replace ours, but we are waiting to see if the results of their program truly have the effect of promoting sustainable practices.

Based on our experience with the sustainable tourism evaluation, we have made the following "autocritica", as they say in Spanish, about our process. We hope it will be of use to anyone contemplating an evaluation in another country, or a study of such efforts.

The cost of conducting a comprehensive evaluation is beyond what we could continue to afford ourselves. We limited ourselves to ecotourism establishments (those having a natural reserve or operating tours to a nearby area) because we felt that ecotourism was the sector most vulnerable to "green-washing".

Part of what makes the evaluation so expensive is the amount of time required for site visits and personal interviews. We learned that preliminary phone calls and personal visits greatly increased participation and accuracy, so we continued with that for subsequent versions. But we found that our spending so much extra time at each lodging made our trips much longer and more expensive.

Despite our consultation with experts for such survey questions as solid waste and sewage disposal, our evaluation would have been stronger had we been able to contract technicians to inspect these facilities at each lodging. As it was, we visited each lodging's dump and were shown where the sewage pipes were buried, which we believe gave us a good idea of whether these areas were well-managed or not.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty for us in this endeaver was the obligation we had to divide ourselves in half. On one hand we were subjective book writers who spoke out about what we liked and didn't like in each lodging. That has always been evident in our textual description of each place. On the other hand, carrying out the survey transformed us into objective evaluators, blind to how we personally felt about each place. We knew we were successful at splitting our personalities because in a few instances, we had to recognize establishments we did not particularly like, or we could not give recognition to places we loved. An ideal solution to this conflict of interest/heart, which we tried to fashion, was to pass our methodology and records to a separate, non-profit evaluation team, which would continue carrying out the survey and provide our book with a list of sustainable lodgings for each new edition. We found a few interested organizations, but they were not prepared to work without assured funding, and they wanted us to pin down funding before taking on the project. Our lack of time and suitable contacts has prevented us from passing the baton in this way, and so we are hoping that the tourism board's survey will be able to do what we wanted to do. For now we are continuing the survey ourselves.

We are concerned about the proliferation of tourism certification processes - especially those based on paid membership in the certifying organization and self-evaluations. We worry that if the public sees that different certifying organizations recognize different lodgings, the general perception will be that all evaluation methods are subjective and any lodging can buy its way into a certification. Ideally, we believe that a sustainable-tourism umbrella organization should certify the certifiers, to prevent the misuse of this process.

Despite the difficulties cited above, we are satisfied that our evaluation has helped the cause of sustainable tourism in Costa Rica. The lodgings we recognize have benefitted from our recognition, both in increased business and publicity, and in attention from owners and management to maintaining the sustainable practices that earned them their place on our list. Tourism - be it "sustainable" or not - is a risky business, subject to the whims of an unpredictable market. We remain hopeful that our recognition of the best ecotourism lodges there will help carry them through the difficult economic realities of running a successful tourism business in Costa Rica.

Cover Those interested in more details on rating hotels should also read the authors' Hierarchy of Importance of Criteria for the New Key Sustainable Tourism Survey.

Anne Becher Anne.Becher@Colorado.EDU and Beatrice Blake moranblake@acadia.net are the authors of The New to Key Costa Rica available at bookstores or from Amazon.com.

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Eco Travels in Costa Rica

Greening hotels and restaurants

Reflections on "Green Ratings" by Anne Becher and Beatrice Blake

PLANETA.COM GUIDES

Reflections on "Green Ratings"
by Anne Becher and Beatrice Blake