Green Tourism Club Meetings
Green Tourism Club Meetings, Alfriston 25th July and Petersfield 26th July
The first meetings of the South Downs Green Tourism Business Club (GTBC) took place on consecutive days in the last week of July.
Alfriston Youth Hostel hosted the first meeting on Tuesday 25th July, while the Langrish House Hotel near Petersfield was the venue for the second meeting a day later. The next meetings are now being planned for early October 2006.
The meetings are free and open to any tourism or related business – in or close to the South Downs - with an interest in improving their knowledge of sustainability and ‘all things green’.
The GTBC was formed following an exploratory meeting late last year, which agreed that the Club’s roles should be to:
a) build on the ‘sustainability momentum’ created by business participation in the Pilot Green Tourism Business Scheme (GTBS);
b) share best practice in sustainability amongst club members;
c) provide a means of obtaining up to date, specialist advice on relevant issues, best practice and products etc;
d) act as a pressure group to raise awareness of the importance of sustainability to the tourism industry in the South Downs and more generally;
e) raise the profile of GTBS accredited businesses with the public at large, TIC staff, tourism officers, the environmental business community and others;
f) Help to raise support funding for sustainable tourism initiatives in the South Downs.
It was also agreed that the ethos of club members should be to share information as openly as possible and to learn from each other. Part of the meetings will therefore be given over to Network members to enable them to provide examples of good practice or their own experience.
The venues for the first 2 meetings are both GTBS accredited - Gold in the case of Alfriston Youth Hostel and Silver for the Langrish House Hotel. Those at the Alfriston meeting were given a presentation on water efficiency by Jessica Durkota and Stacia Staunton of the Environment Agency, as well as hearing how the Youth Hostel installed its rainwater harvesting scheme with grant support from the South Downs Sustainable Development Fund.
At the Langrish meeting, there was much discussion of the need for accommodation grading schemes to take account of good sustainable practice. Tom Carpenter of the Jane Austen House Museum 'walked the talk' by cycling more than 10 miles to attend the meeting.
Thanks are due to both hostesses - Wendy Nicholls at Alfriston and Robina Talbot Ponsonby at Langrish - for hosting the Club's first two meetings, full notes of which can be downloaded as a PDF document.
Notes of July Green Club meetings (Adobe Acrobat)
The Langrish House Hotel, venue for the East Hampshire meeting of the Green Tourism Business Club
