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Much of the tourism that calls itself “eco” has little to do with ecotourism, and much of the most sustainable tourism on any coast never uses either word.
That sounds like a paradox, but it comes from a simple confusion. We tend to treat the two terms as synonyms, both meaning something green that happens among trees. Strictly speaking, ecotourism is a kind of trip, travel into nature organized so that it protects the place and the people around it, while sustainable tourism is a standard that any kind of tourism can meet or fail, the big beach hotel included. They answer different questions, and mixing them up lets a lot of weak work hide behind a nice label while good work goes unnoticed.
A cabin in the pines and a resort on the beach
Picture two places. One is a wooden cabin in a pine forest above the Mediterranean, with a solar panel on the roof and a hand painted sign that says “eco”. The other is a large beach hotel on a busy stretch of coast, with hundreds of rooms, several pools and a buffet that feeds thousands of people every day. Ask which one is more sustainable and almost everyone picks the cabin within a second.
I understand why. It looks right. But the honest answer has little to do with the trees and almost everything to do with how each one is run. The cabin might have been built by clearing part of that forest, and its wastewater might be running into the stream below. The hotel might be metering every litre it uses, buying cheese from a cooperative in the next valley and calling back the same cooks every spring.
The thought experiment shows where the two ideas part. Ecotourism, in the sense most people in our field use it and close to how The International Ecotourism Society defines it, is travel to natural areas that helps protect them, benefits the people living around them and teaches the visitor something about the place. It is a product: you can book it, put it into a program and describe it in a sentence. A week of walking in the mountains with a local guide, a stretch of a long-distance trail like the Lycian Way with nights in village guesthouses, a birdwatching morning in a river delta, a canyon walk that ends in a village kitchen. What separates it from an ordinary trip into nature is the way it is organized. Groups are small, the guide knows the birds, the plants and the families, part of the money stays in the valley and the visitor goes home understanding why that place matters.
Sustainable tourism is a different kind of word, and in any argument about regenerative tourism vs sustainable tourism it is the floor both sides stand on. It is not something you book; it is a yardstick you hold up against any kind of tourism. The idea, in UN Tourism’s wording, is tourism that takes full account of its economic, social and environmental impacts, now and later, and serves visitors, the industry, the environment and the people who live in a destination. The same page says it applies to all forms of tourism, mass tourism included, a part green brochures tend to skip. A city break can be sustainable or not. So can a congress, a cruise call, an all-inclusive resort, a thermal hotel selling wellness tourism or that cabin in the pines.
For most holiday destinations this is far from a technical detail. The bulk of their tourism is sea, sun and large coastal hotels. If sustainability belonged only to small nature lodges, it would exclude the places where most guests actually sleep, and the conversation would become pleasant and almost useless.
Can a trip into nature do harm?
It can, and in some places it is the main source of harm.
Think of a mountain meadow on a long summer weekend: a convoy of cars climbing a single road, tents pitched shoulder to shoulder along the stream, portable speakers competing with each other, bags of rubbish waiting by the roadside on Monday morning. Think of a bungalow site opened by cutting trees, or a jeep safari raising dust through the same village several times a day. All of this happens in nature, and none of it protects nature.
I don’t want to be unfair to the people behind these businesses. Many simply responded to demand that grew faster than anyone had prepared for, and some of them would happily work differently if their customers asked. Still, it is worth saying clearly that placing a tent or a cabin among trees does not make anything sustainable. The forest is the setting, not the evidence.
It helps me to keep three words apart here, because the one in the middle is the one that usually goes missing:
| Term | What it describes | What I would ask before believing it |
|---|---|---|
| Nature-based tourism | Any trip whose main draw is a natural place: a beach, a canyon, a meadow, a forest | What does the visit do to the place, and how many people does it bring at once? |
| Ecotourism | A nature trip organized to protect the place, benefit the people around it and teach the visitor | Who guides, who gets paid locally, and what is the group actually told on the trail? |
| Sustainable tourism | A standard for running any kind of tourism, from a cabin to a cruise call | Which figures does the business measure, and has anything changed because of them? |
Most of what the market calls eco sits in the first row and borrows the vocabulary of the second.
The opposite is also true, and it deserves equal attention. In Türkiye, where I work, as in any country with mountains and a coastline, there are operators who do ecotourism very well, often small companies run by people who grew up walking those mountains or fishing that coast. They keep groups small, use local guides and village houses, teach visitors where not to step and bring money into places that see little of it otherwise. They are not the majority of the market. They are the ones who show what the word was supposed to mean.
Water meters, local cheese and the cook who comes back every spring
Back to the beach hotel. In a place like that, sustainability is not a slogan but a set of rather boring things done consistently over many seasons.
Water comes first on most warm coasts, where a resort district’s population can multiply in summer precisely when it rains least. A hotel that reads a single main meter knows how much water it uses; a hotel with separate meters on the laundry, the kitchen and the gardens knows where it uses it, and that is usually where the real savings begin. Waste follows close behind: a buffet that refills smaller trays more often instead of building mountains of food, a kitchen that separates packaging and organic waste from the start rather than at the end of a long night.
Then there are the people. In our business we talk endlessly about plastic and energy and far less about the seasonal staff who arrive in April and leave in October. A hotel that calls back the same chef and the same housekeeping team every year, and keeps a few of them busy in winter with training, is building a profession in that district. Nobody photographs it, but it is part of the definition.
To be fair, a large resort has a large footprint however well it is run, and nobody should pretend otherwise. The point is not that the big hotel is automatically greener. The point is that the label tells you very little and the management tells you almost everything.
Ecotourism describes where you go and what you do there, while sustainable tourism describes whether the place is still glad to have tourism ten years later.
The economic side is the one most often forgotten. The question is not whether tourism earns money but where that money ends up and for how long. A hotel that brings its cheese, olives, vegetables and even its staff from far away leaves a smaller share in the district than its turnover suggests. Guests notice it too, since the hotel restaurant is often the only food tourism they will do all week. A tour program that stops the bus every day at the same large showroom with a commission arrangement sends the guests’ spending into very few hands. The same program could put a local restaurant at lunch, a guide from the region on the bus and an hour in the district’s own market, and its price would barely change. What would change is who gets paid.
Season length, the practical face of seasonality in tourism, belongs here too. A place that works five months a year gives its suppliers and staff five months of income. Spring cycling events and winter training camps on the coast are sports tourism doing exactly that work. So are the faith tourism groups who visit early Christian sites in the cooler months. Every extra week in spring or autumn, filled with walking, cycling, food or small meetings, is a week in which the cook does not need to look for other work, and that is as much a sustainability measure as any solar panel.
Certificates help when the paperwork changes the kitchen
Everybody knows the little card in the hotel bathroom asking you to hang up your towel if you are happy to use it again. It is not a bad idea. It is simply not a policy.
The more serious tools are certificates built on recognized criteria. The Global Sustainable Tourism Council sets common criteria for hotels, tour operators and destinations, and independent bodies certify against them; several countries also run national sustainable tourism programs for accommodation built on those criteria. For a whole destination the work usually falls to a DMO or a similar body able to gather figures from many businesses at once. What I value in such certificates is less the frame on the lobby wall and more the questions a hotel has to answer on the way there: where the water goes, how much waste is separated, how many staff and suppliers come from the area. There is a commercial side as well, and it is where tourism trends turn into contract terms, since some of the large European tour operators that send guests to Mediterranean resorts now ask their partner hotels for a recognized certificate. What a certificate covers matters, though, because a certified hotel does not certify the jeep safari sold at its reception desk, and an award given to a destination does not quietly extend to every property inside it.
People often confuse these with the Blue Flag, which tells you about the water quality and safety of a beach or marina. It is a valuable sign and very common on Mediterranean coasts, but a flag on the beach tells you nothing about how the hotel behind it manages its kitchen or treats its staff.
Then comes greenwashing, which in tourism usually begins with a single word: “eco” in the name of a property that cleared a hillside to build itself, “in harmony with nature” in the brochure of a place that cannot say where its wastewater goes. A hotel that writes “this season we started metering laundry water separately and buying our cheese from the local cooperative, and we have not yet done anything about energy” convinces me far more than a green logo ever could, precisely because it admits what is missing.
For a business, the practical meaning is not complicated. If you sell mountain walks with village guides, you are selling ecotourism, and you had better be sustainable too. If you run a beach resort or a city hotel, you probably should not call yourself eco at all, but you can certainly be sustainable and show it with figures that belong to you. Which of the two words does your own business deserve, and which one are you actually using?