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The tourism and travel industry is to receive United Nations help to improve its performance on human rights.
The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), a UN specialist agency, is creating a framework for companies in the sector to ‘address human rights within their business operations’. The framework will be based on a specific set of human rights principles for the industry, with appendices for sub-sectors such as airlines and hotels.
UNWTO already has a Global Code of Ethics for Tourism, comprising nine articles outlining areas of concern. These will underpin the framework, which will focus on the practicalities of addressing human rights.
The UN will produce the document with the International Business Leaders’ Forum, which will provide input through its own special interest group, the Tourism Partnership, set up in 2004 for companies to share experiences on CSR issues. Its members include American Express, Four Seasons, Hilton, Intercontinental, Jumeirah, Marriott, Rezidor and Starwood.
Dawid de Villiers, special adviser to UNWTO on ethical matters, said the Tourism and Human Rights Initiative, as it will be known, will cover health and safety, commercial exploitation of children, employment of migrant workers, discrimination, and the displacement of indigenous people.
The principles will be drawn up after consultation with civil society groups, partly at confidential roundtable meetings. The first guidelines will be for the hotel industry, enabling companies to benchmark their human rights performance, according to de Villiers.
PricewaterhouseCoopers recently found European hotels are still behind most other sub-sectors on CSR policies. After studying Europe’s 14 largest publicly listed hotel companies, it concluded that overall their efforts to improve their social and environmental performance were ‘very fragmented’, although the industry’s complex structure was a mitigating factor.
Three-quarters of the companies in the PwC study publicly reported on corporate responsibility, but only a third had clearly stated board responsibility for their CSR programmes.
In 2002 the UN Environment Programme issued a strongly-worded call for tourism and travel businesses to improve their social and environmental performance (EP4, issue 3) after finding that in an industry worth £75billion ($131bn) a year, only £107million is spent on holidays and services marketed as responsible.
According to Richard Holbrooke, president and chief executive of the Global Coalition on HIV/Aids, the slow progress to date is partly due to the sensitive nature of the issues involved, such as Aids. ‘Nobody wants to warn tourists to the Caribbean that it is second only to Africa in HIV/Aids prevalence’, he said.
In an attempt to galvanize companies in the sector, the IBLF’s International Tourism Partnership is organizing what is being billed as the first global conference on corporate responsibility and tourism, to be held in Singapore next month.
The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), a UN specialist agency, is creating a framework for companies in the sector to ‘address human rights within their business operations’. The framework will be based on a specific set of human rights principles for the industry, with appendices for sub-sectors such as airlines and hotels.
UNWTO already has a Global Code of Ethics for Tourism, comprising nine articles outlining areas of concern. These will underpin the framework, which will focus on the practicalities of addressing human rights.
The UN will produce the document with the International Business Leaders’ Forum, which will provide input through its own special interest group, the Tourism Partnership, set up in 2004 for companies to share experiences on CSR issues. Its members include American Express, Four Seasons, Hilton, Intercontinental, Jumeirah, Marriott, Rezidor and Starwood.
Dawid de Villiers, special adviser to UNWTO on ethical matters, said the Tourism and Human Rights Initiative, as it will be known, will cover health and safety, commercial exploitation of children, employment of migrant workers, discrimination, and the displacement of indigenous people.
The principles will be drawn up after consultation with civil society groups, partly at confidential roundtable meetings. The first guidelines will be for the hotel industry, enabling companies to benchmark their human rights performance, according to de Villiers.
PricewaterhouseCoopers recently found European hotels are still behind most other sub-sectors on CSR policies. After studying Europe’s 14 largest publicly listed hotel companies, it concluded that overall their efforts to improve their social and environmental performance were ‘very fragmented’, although the industry’s complex structure was a mitigating factor.
Three-quarters of the companies in the PwC study publicly reported on corporate responsibility, but only a third had clearly stated board responsibility for their CSR programmes.
In 2002 the UN Environment Programme issued a strongly-worded call for tourism and travel businesses to improve their social and environmental performance (EP4, issue 3) after finding that in an industry worth £75billion ($131bn) a year, only £107million is spent on holidays and services marketed as responsible.
According to Richard Holbrooke, president and chief executive of the Global Coalition on HIV/Aids, the slow progress to date is partly due to the sensitive nature of the issues involved, such as Aids. ‘Nobody wants to warn tourists to the Caribbean that it is second only to Africa in HIV/Aids prevalence’, he said.
In an attempt to galvanize companies in the sector, the IBLF’s International Tourism Partnership is organizing what is being billed as the first global conference on corporate responsibility and tourism, to be held in Singapore next month.
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