The Responsible Tourism Awards are organised by founder responsibletravel.com, with support from media partners Metro, Geographical Magazine (the magazine of the Royal Geographical Society), and World Travel Market, where the Awards are given out. The judging process is designed and organised in partnership with the International Centre for Responsible Tourism, and Virgin Holidays have supported the Awards as headline sponsor since 2007.Since they were founded in 2004, the Awards have attracted over 10,000 nominations from members of the public, leading to 201 unique organisations Awarded from 51countries around the world.What are the Awards for?The Responsible Tourism Awards were founded in 2004 to celebrate and inspire change in the tourism industry. The Awards rest on a simple principle – that all types of tourism, from niche to mainstream, can and should be organised in a way that preserves, respects and benefits destinations and local people.We want to celebrate the shining stars of responsible tourism – the individuals, organisations and destinations working innovatively with local cultures, communities and biodiversity.But more than that, we want their examples to inspire others. That’s why we’ve got the most rigorous judging process around, and work with the best partners in the industry to help us get the word out – to ensure that their stories provide an example to the industry.

Rather than handpick our nominees, we rely on travellers and the industry to nominate those tourism ventures with exciting stories to share. This makes our Awards unique – we don’t pre-decide the winners, we let you tell us who should be in the running. Every year we team up with our media partners to invite the public to make their nominations, and every year this process yields hundreds of unique nominees.

All it takes for someone to be considered for an Award is one nomination in any of our 13 categories. It isn’t a popularity contest; one nomination is enough to be entered.

Once all the nominations are received the judging process really begins – several stages designed with the International Centre for Responsible Tourism to put our nominees through their paces. At each stage the list gets shorter, until our expert panel of judges are ready to combine their knowledge to debate the winners on our annual Judging Day. Read more about the Judging process.

What does it mean to be a winner?

Finalists of the Awards are invited to a prestigious ceremony hosted as part of World Responsible Tourism Day at the World Travel Market in London, where the winners are announced to an audience of tourism ministers, destination managers, industry professionals and media. We work with a variety of media partners to share the stories of our winners with the public – including Metro, and Geographical magazine.