Ecotourism: Responsible Travel or Marketing Sham?

"You have to see it to Belize it" was scrawled across the T-shirts I saw hung on a roadside stall in Belize City a decade ago. Belize's barrier reef -- the second largest in the world -- had just been enlisted as a world heritage site and the country was gearing up for a surge in tourism. Ten years on, Belize now vies with Costa Rica as the ecotourism capital of central America.

Its success reflects a growing trend for travel that puts something back into the environment and local communities. Britain's buoyant green pound is sustaining a green travel market worth £409m and it is set to grow by 25 percent a year, according to a recent report by market research analyst Mintel.

Yet there is currently no single internationally accepted standard for green tourism. Holidaymakers have to grapple with over 350 independent eco-labels, most of which are designed as a checklist for the industry, rather than as a searchable tool for travellers. Many assess only on environmental credentials so they don't provide any guarantee of quality, and none are held to account by one internationally accepted accreditation body so you can't compare like with like.

And not all eco-holidays are everything they're cracked up to be. The popular South American ecotourism website planeta.com cites John Noble, editor of Lonely Planet's Mexico guidebook, who said, "What you call 'ecotourism' in Latin America, in Europe we call a 'walk in the country'."

Others take a harsher line, labelling faux ecotourism "greenwashing." And it's hardly something new. During the United Nations' International Year of Ecotourism in 2002, Patricia Barnett of Tourism Concern said the ecotourism label could be "used by anyone at anytime for anything from a small-scale locally-run rainforest lodge where the money goes to support a local community, to a large, luxury, foreign-owned resort which has little community involvement and uses masses of natural resources".

The hijacking of the "eco" label by tourism businesses riding cheaply on the green wave means that nowadays you're unlikely to see the word ecotourism used in British tour operators' brochures. Harold Goodwin, professor of responsible tourism management at Leeds Metropolitan University told me, "Ecotourism has no marketing utility because people just don't believe it anymore."

Greenwashing comes in various guises. In some cases it can be little more than cheeky marketing -- a golf course claiming it is eco because a few swans live on a lake is par for the course in an industry that's obsessed with hype. But there is a more serious side to it, especially at the sharp end of poverty. Tourism Concern has campaigned for the last 15 years against some of the worst offenders, such as the eviction of the Maasai and Samburu people from their lands in east Africa in order to establish what the developers called "conservation and safari tourism."

But ecotourism -- and greenwashing -- are no longer confined to the central American rainforest or the African bush. Just as the green agenda has gone mainstream, from city breaks to summer holidays in the Med, so we start hearing about so-called eco-friendly spas that do little more than sell fair trade bananas in the bistro. This undermines the genuine article.

One of the champions of a more sustainable hotel industry is the hotel chain Scandic, which has refurbished over 10,000 eco-rooms with almost 100 percent recyclable material. Other hotels that are likewise going the extra mile to green up their operations do much more than asking guests to put their towels out for washing; often it involves a fundamental change to the way they run their business, through investing in more efficient technologies that minimise their use of electricity and water.