World Tourism Day, sustainability is everybody’s responsibility

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Tourism is synonymous with travelling, enjoying yourself, discovering new places and meeting new people. It’s about broadening your horizons, opening yourself up to new adventures that leave an endless impression on us. Ultimately, it is an activity that makes us happy, no matter how we prefer to travel.

As companies working in this industry, as much in Bahia Principe Hotel & Resorts as in its twin, Grupo Piñero, we feel a certain responsibility to align all these amazing experiences with promoting sustainable development in all destinations in which we have made our mark.

World Tourism Day, celebrated every 27th September, is a good time to see whether we are fulfilling our responsibility. We still have much to do but it is also comforting to know that everything we have already done contributes to tourism and sustainability being able to develop together.

Further to our commitment to sustainable tourism, we put in place a strategy plan of Corporate Social Responsibility in 2015. This has helped us directly incorporate 6 of the 17 Goals of Sustainable Development of the United Nations.

Since 2016, our work on sustainability has been marked by three fields of action. Within our company, our efforts have been directed at improving the living conditions of more than 10,000 of our employees, placing special importance on their personal and professional fulfillment.

Regarding the environment, we are focused on trying to notably reduce the environmental impact of our hotels and preserve the biodiversity of their surroundings. For this, we have implemented energy saving and efficiency measures that are allow us to reduce our consumption.

And last but not least, in terms of social actions, we have allocated a large amount of money to different organisations that work to improve the lifestyle of others, focusing primarily on the children and youth of the countries where our hotels can be found.

The efforts made in this field have come with two rewards. The first is that 11 of Bahia Principe’s hotels have received a total of 15 recognitions for sustainability from the most prestigious entities in this field: Travelife and Earth Check. The second, which for us is the most important, is the feeling that we are heading in the right direction with our commitment to sustainable tourism; whereby continuing to create moments of happiness without being a burden to the environment.