Coastal & Maritime Tourism

 In the Quality Coast Award programme EUCC cooperates with approximately 100 coastal and island destinations.

Quality Coast programme

With the QualityCoast programme, the Coastal & Marine Union - EUCC aims to establish a worldwide network of coastal communities that share similar values on sustainable development, nature and biodiversity, cultural heritage and identity, and social responsibility, at the same time maintaining high standards in the quality of their tourism. QualityCoast has been developed in the EU INTERREG IIIC project Coastal Practice Network (CoPraNet) by 21 partners from 11 countries under the lead of the Coastal & Marine Union – EUCC. The QualityCoast programme was the result of the development of success indicators of Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) at local level, in connection to the implementation of the EU Recommendation for ICZM (2002). QualityCoast provides new ways of cooperation between coastal communities. Communities join a network of like-minded communities and share their experiences and best practices in order to improve sustainability and social responsibility in tourism. Their performance in these fields is connected to international tourism marketing through certification under the supervision of an independent international jury issuing QualityCoast Awards. In the QualityCoast Award programme EUCC cooperates with approximately 100 coastal and island destinations.

High preformance level

In 2016, EUCC has been implementing the QualityCoast assessment and awards programme involving ca. 30 destinations, all European.

We also cooperated – along with the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC), to the Green Destinations and TravelMole – VISION competition for the 2016 Sustainable Destinations Global Top 100. 50 of the selected hundred destinations are EU destinations, and generally with higher scores than destinations in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This high performance at global tourism level is largely due to the support given by EUCC is QualityCoast programme to - already 150 - European destinations, since 2006, with the support of the European Commission.

Green Deal

In November 2016 EUCC completed the Green Deal for sustainable tourism, together with the Dutch government and ten other organisations, including ECNC, TUI Benelux, Corendon.com, Booking.com affiliate BookDifferent.com, and Green Destinations. This was the result of a strategic cooperation with the tourism industry that EUCC and ECNC had initiated in 2013. As part of the Green Deal, all information on QualityCoast destinations was included in the Green Destinations Database, along with many more data on ca. 800 European destinations. These data are since early 2014 displayed to consumers by BookDifferent (www.bookdifferent.com/en/green-travel-destinations).
www.qualitycoast.info
Main financing Agency : Participating local and regional authorities, European Union.