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IN BRIEF
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A still discreet but essential public platform, France Tourisme Durable offers operational advice, a personalized assessment, and a mapping tool to guide agencies, tourist offices, accommodation providers, and other stakeholders toward a credible ecological transition. This article describes how it works, outlines its key figures, details the levers for action (mobility, water, waste, biodiversity), illustrates with inspiring cases, and indicates the first steps to get involved without delay.
Designed with the support of Atout France and institutional partners, the France Tourisme Durable platform primarily targets travel professionals who wish to structure their approach to responsible tourism. Free and open, it aggregates practical resources, articles and guides that shed light on the issues, and above all a diagnostic tool to situate each organization in relation to its commitments, needs, and areas for improvement. The ambition is simple and concrete: to equip the profession so that it offers the public experiences that are more respectful of places, residents, and the environment.
An open platform and structured support
The heart of the system lies in a personalized assessment that, in a few steps, helps evaluate the maturity of your organization on key aspects: visitor mobility, water consumption, waste management, energy, biodiversity, local anchoring, and customer experience. The result takes the form of a clear positioning, accompanied by priority recommendations and graduated action ideas according to your context (size, territory, seasonality). A section called “map of sustainable tourism” allows visualizing the issues by territory, to better target efforts where they are most needed.
Figures that change the perspective
Some orders of magnitude, contextualized by the platform, help understand the urgency and scale of the transformation. In France, tourism activity is highly concentrated: a share close to 80% of flows occurs over a limited fraction of the territory, which increases local pressures. The sector has a significant weight in the economy: nearly 2 million jobs and around 7.5% of GDP, with a major role played by hospitality and catering that employs over one million workers. Regarding climate, the diagnosis is unequivocal: around three-quarters of tourism emissions come from visitor mobility (car, plane, etc.), and tourism accounts for about one-tenth of national GHG emissions. The context of warming has already materialized, with an average temperature rise of approximately +1.7°C since 1900. Tourist areas generate significantly more waste than the rest of the country (over 50% additional), and a vacationer’s water consumption often far exceeds daily levels (around 230 liters per person per day on vacation compared to about 148 liters outside of vacation). Ecologically, nearly one-quarter of evaluated species in France are threatened, a proportion even higher in overseas territories. Customer expectations are very clear: more than 8 out of 10 French people want eco-responsible offers in restaurants, and a majority believes it is primarily up to tourism professionals to act to reduce the environmental impact of trips.
What impact for travel stakeholders?
For agencies, tourist offices, accommodation providers, or transporters, the interest is twofold: to prioritize high-impact actions and to document progress with customers. A tour operator that assembles European itineraries can, for example, rely on the mobility diagnostic to arbitrate the modes of transport and reduce the most polluting air segments. The issues described in dedicated pages for European flights remain relevant: optimizing hubs, replacing flights with train travel for journeys shorter than a few hours, promoting slow travel and micro-adventure. The personalized assessment, by identifying the “hot spots” of your offerings, facilitates these reconfigurations.
Cases and inspirations from the field
The transition is nourished by concrete examples. On the local governance side, the role of a tourist office manager in Guingamp illustrates how a territory can structure a sustainable roadmap by coordinating accommodation providers, restaurateurs, and mobility stakeholders. In accommodation, the commitment of the Saint-Front welcome center demonstrates the implementation of tangible actions: energy sobriety, careful water management, waste sorting and recovery, partnerships with local producers. The diffusion of flows is another lever: a Jura village, a haven of peace, highlights the importance of offering peaceful getaways, away from overcrowded routes. Finally, the reflection does not stop at borders: experiences of responsible tourism in Nepal feed a common culture of best practices, useful for French operators designing distant trips.
Finding your way, mapping, prioritizing
The “map of sustainable tourism” is more than just a visualization: it is a decision-making tool. By overlaying attendance data, water pressure, or ecological sensitivity, one quickly identifies the seasons and areas at risk of overcrowding. A tourist office can then promote temporal (off-season) or spatial (nearby but less frequented sites) alternatives, while an accommodation provider adjusts its sobriety messages during peak periods (encouraging linen reuse, flow reducers, rainwater recovery). The tool also encourages collaboration among actors in the same living area to pool solutions.
Mobility: the primary source of decarbonization
Since mobility concentrates most of the emissions, it is where the gains are quickest. The platform highlights a bouquet of actions: adding a rail option when travel time is competitive, building multimodal offers (train + shuttle + bike), lengthening the average stay to limit the number of round trips, encouraging proximity (destinations within a few hours), and providing better information on the carbon footprint of each choice. Compensations may exist, but the reduction at source is paramount. Agencies benefit from training their advisors to simply explain these choices, backed by evidence and comparisons.
Water, waste, energy: joyful and measurable sobriety
The overconsumption of water during vacations and the increase in waste in tourist areas call for visible and educational measures: fountains + reusable bottles, enhanced sorting with multilingual signage, composting, partnerships with local reuse centers. In hospitality, sobriety comes from maintenance (flow reducers, presence detectors), supply (short circuits, seasonal menus), and commitment levels communicated to clients. The approach relies on simple indicators: liters of water per night, kg of waste per stay, kWh per room. Measure, display, improve.
Biodiversity and local anchoring
In fragile natural spaces, the priority is to preserve rather than “consume” the landscape. Marked trails, visitation charters, cultural and natural mediation, and partnerships with local guides reduce the impact and enrich the experience. Responsible purchasing (local producers, handicrafts, labels) strengthens local supply chains and spreads value beyond hyper-frequented sites.
Tools, training, and communication
The platform brings together training resources and guides to structure an action plan: drafting a CSR policy, raising awareness among teams, integrating environmental criteria into supplier contracts, reporting modalities. For clients, the information must be factual and desirable: showcasing benefits (silence, clean air, encounters), explaining choices (train, seasonality), and proposing simple gestures that improve the impact of the stay without diminishing enjoyment. The strong expectation from consumers for eco-responsible offers makes this transparency distinguishing.
For whom and how to start?
The approach targets all tourism professionals, from small agencies to accommodation networks. First step: conduct the personalized assessment to identify your priorities. Second step: choose a few high-impact actions (mobility, water, waste) and organize their deployment with simple indicators. Third step: share your progress through stories and evidence, drawing inspiration from experiences like those in Guingamp, Saint-Front, or tranquil Jura destinations. To explore the resources and access the tool, visit the public platform France Tourisme Durable (francetourismedurable.gouv.fr).
