It is with great pleasure and enormous pride that we announce that we will continue to be linked to the Miosotis Award, promoted by the Regional Environment Directorate.<\/p>\n
What is the Miosotis Azores prize?<\/p>\n
With a growing focus on innovative products, tourism is synergistically combined with the environmental aspect, generating inseparable activities and in close interdependence. Tourist activities need an environment to occur, whether natural or not, and this interaction can result in potentially positive or negative impacts, dependent on the care, actions and associated principles. In the opposite direction, conditioning tourism activities, climate change is an example on a global scale, testing innovative and creative capacity.<\/p>\n
In view of the negative impacts associated with the presence of a more conservative tourism, the concern arose with its minimization, creating a tourism activity in harmony and with principles of environmental integration: sustainable tourism. According to the World Tourism Organization (WTO), sustainable tourism is considered one that meets the needs of current tourists and host regions and, at the same time, protects and promotes opportunities for the future. Specifically, the sustainable development of tourism must be managed through the management of all resources, so that they can satisfy economic, social and aesthetic needs, respecting cultural integrity, ecological processes, biodiversity and other natural systems that sustain life from that location.<\/p>\n
Inserted in the concerns of local sustainability increasingly demanded by users, accommodation and tourism enterprises, there are several fronts for the recognition of environmental quality, namely certification and eco-labels. In the Azores, this adhesion has very little expression due to the inadequacy of some criteria to the local reality and, in some cases, to the fees associated with registration and requests. To fill this gap and, in order to guarantee judicious and adequate environmental practices, to be implemented in local tourism companies, it was necessary to restructure and create new parameters and accelerate the recognition with the creation of this award.<\/p>\n
The award aims to promote sustainable tourism, rewarding good environmental practices in tourism developments in the Azores and raising awareness among their owners, employees and customers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"