Monday, April 12, 2010

Center for Sustainable Tourism and Green Plus

Up in Asheville last week, I ran into Dr. Pat Long again.  He is Director of the East Carolina University Center for Sustainable Tourism in Greenville NC and his team were meeting with NOAA and also conducting an educational presentation to Destination Marketing Association of North Carolina.Capture

Turns out Pat is also a fellow Harley enthusiast and rider and we found four of us at one table that night for dinner including Mike Butts (Triumph) with the DMO in Charlotte and Tim Lampkin (Honda) with the DMO in Asheville.

The Center is a proponent of the same “triple bottom line” approach used by the Green Plus certification at the Center for Sustainable Development, a joint program with Duke University in Durham and based at the University of of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  DCVB when I worked there because the first DMO in the nation to earn that certification.

Since North Carolina doesn’t have a certification program for tourism businesses, it seems the most efficient way to go about none is to work with Green Plus to add modules if necessary.  Hopefully Pat and Chris Carmody at Green Plus can get together on that along with DMANC and the NCDTSFD.

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