Building the foundations of a sustainable tourism business

This phase helps you understand what sustainability means within tourism, how the three interconnected aspects, environmental, social, and economic, function together, and how your business can begin aligning its operations with shared regional and national objectives. In tourism, sustainability signifies a collective effort to protect the environment, respect people and culture, and secure the long-term prosperity of local economies. It’s not a one-off action but an ongoing journey of learning, adapting, and improving. Viewing sustainability as an interconnected system enables you to see how every decision in your business affects broader outcomes for visitors, communities, and the planet.

Reflective questions to get you started:

• What sustainability values already influence your business choices?
• How do your operations impact the environment, local culture, and regional economy?
• Which of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are most related to your work?
• What information or data could assist you in measuring your current impact?

This phase draws on Destination NSW’s Sustainable Tourism Resources, the National Sustainability Framework for the Visitor Economy, Austrade’s Sustainable Tourism Toolkit (2023) and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Explore the ‘Defining sustainable tourism’ section to learn more about the three dimensions of sustainable tourism, how your business can link its activities to the SDGs, and ways to begin self-assessing your sustainability performance.