Kuoni is committed to the Travelife standards for sustainable tourism. The Travelife concept enables a wide range of standardised social and environmental sustainability criteria to be maintained and monitored at hotels worldwide. Hotels observing the standards are awarded the Travelife Gold, Silver or Bronze label, enabling their achievement to be clearly communicated to Kuoni customers. Travelife is a joint initiative by a number of tour operators around the world to ensure the systematic management of sustainable performance throughout the value chain.
As a tour operator, Kuoni is closely involved with all aspects of travel, today and in the future. As part of this involvement, Kuoni strives to ensure that global tourist activity has as much positive and as little negative impact as possible on the local people and environment.
Kuoni’s collaborations with its service partners – and hotels in particular – play a vital role here. The company has devised a Supplier Code of Conduct which lays down fundamental criteria that must be observed in terms of protecting children from exploitation, ensuring fair working conditions and safeguarding the natural environment. As an initial step, these requirements have been incorporated into Kuoni’s contractual agreements with hotels all over the world.
Kuoni also takes a number of actions – workshops for example – to encourage its partner hotels to steadily further improve their own sustainability management. The Travelife collaboration also permits better monitoring of its suppliers’ working methods and general developments at destinations, as well as providing hotels with a genuine incentive to make an even greater commitment to sustainable tourist development. In all these activities, Kuoni aims to promote and encourage the potential among its suppliers and service providers to enhance their sustainability performance, offering them the expertise they may need to further improve their products and services. Travelife provides a means not only of monitoring their achievements, but of clearly communicating these to customers and other interested parties.
Travelife awards are bestowed on hotels that assume responsibility for ensuring sustainable tourist development. The awards are based on individual assessments of some 100 different criteria. Sparing use of energy and water resources, reducing waste and procuring goods from local suppliers where possible are all key considerations, as are the fair treatment of employees and maintaining an intensive dialogue and exchange with the local population.
The standards required in each of these categories become steadily more demanding for the Travelife Bronze, Silver and Gold awards:
Travelife Bronze
A Travelife Bronze Award will be bestowed, for example, on a hotel which pays all its employees at least the national minimum wage, which makes efforts to protect children and adolescents from sexual exploitation by tourists (by taking preventive action and sensitising its own personnel) and which saves water and energy and reduces waste as much as possible.
Travelife Silver
To earn the Travelife Silver Award, a hotel will not only have to meet all the standards required for Travelife Bronze (see above); it will also need to have designated an employee each to implement its social and environmental strategies. On top of this, it will need to procure most of its goods from local (rather than international) producers, to benefit the local economy.
Travelife Gold
In addition to meeting all the Travelife Bronze and Silver criteria, any hotel aspiring to the Travelife Gold Award will need to produce regular reports of its positive and negative effects on the local people and environment. In doing so, the hotel will be demonstrating to a broader public that it attaches the highest of priorities to its sustainability performance and credentials.
By working with Travelife, we offer you the opportunity to select particularly sustainability-minded hotels at your holiday destination. You can find these hotels here: