The Criteria of Green Tourism in Kerala-A Journey through the Imperatives of Green Growth

Abstract

Green tourism is defined as environmentally friendly tourism activities with various focuses and meanings. In a broad term, green tourism is about being an environmentally friendly tourist or providing environmentally friendly tourist services. The green tourism concept would be highly appealing to tourism enterprises and operators owing to increasing governmental pressure to improve environmental performance by adopting effective and tangible environmental management techniques. Furthermore, achievement and promotion of internationally recognized environmental awards would be instrumental to the tourism enterprises in marketing their services. As a result, many concerned and responsible parties put forward recommendations for green tourism products to regulate tourism‘s negative impacts. This conceptual paper attempts to discuss green tourism concept, green tourism certification and its processes as well explain the comparative approaches of green tourism in a few countries.

Keywords: green, tourism, certification, sustainability