The Analysis of European Reporting Systems for Responsible Tourism and CSR

This chapter proposes a detailed overview of reporting systems for assessing tourism business responsibility, in terms of compliance with responsible tourism values or CSR principles. The analysis focuses, in particular, on programs that have been mainly developed and applied in Europe and addressed to tour operators. The analysis includes eight reporting systems: the Responsible Tourism Standards of the Italian AITR; the system of the French ATES; the Enterprise Indicator for Responsible Tourism of the Spanish QUIDAMTUR; the CSR Reporting Standards of the German KATE and TourCert; the ATR system of the French ATT; the Tour Operators’ Sector Supplement of the international initiatives TOI and GRI; the system of the English Responsibletravel.com and the Travelife Sustainability System of the European initiative Travelife. The main characteristics of every system have been described (objectives, approaches, standards and indicators, auditing procedure) and a final comparison has been developed in order to identify main commonalities and differences. In addition, the main issues related to these programs have been identified and discussed: the difficulties met by small- and medium-sized enterprises in implementing them; the different attention paid to the triple bottom line dimensions; the inactivity of some systems versus the great consensus reached by other programs.