TIA leads the Tourism Sustainability Commitment (TSC) to support tourism businesses to operate on a sustainable basis across an economic, community, visitor and environment framework. 

The TSC is a bottom-up approach to driving sustainability action, and it has received such strong support from across the industry that TIA has made it a standard part of TIA membership. Over 2,000 tourism operators have signed up to the TSC, and 565 completed the 2024 annual declaration. 

TIA is committed to increasing the impact of the TSC. It operates a successful programme that provides tailored support to operators within regional or sector groups and is exploring how it can scale up the TSC so it can do more. 

Action 8 in Tourism 2050 is Build Sustainability Capability across the tourism industry and specifically to establish a programme to lift the sustainability capability of tourism businesses. 

To advance this Action, TIA has developed and released its Akiaki – Advancing Tourism programme to increase the sustainability and business capability of tourism operators. Akiaki is an online learning programme, to help operators to understand the principles of sustainable tourism and how they can take practical steps within their own business.  

The term ‘regenerative’ has gained increasing currency and is a step beyond ‘sustainability’ on the sustainability/regenerative spectrum. TIA considers both valid and supports each being used in the right context. TIA’s interpretation of sustainability is broad and encompasses regenerative principles in practice.