CREST
Center for Responsible Travel
“Transforming the way the world travels.” That’s the ambitious tagline of the Center for Responsible Travel (CREST), a non-profit research institute based in Washington, DC. Founded in 2003, CREST offers premier expertise on environmentally sustainable and socially responsible tourism. It has built an international network of highly-trained experts who provide interdisciplinary analysis and solutions, published widely from books and peer reviewed articles to studies, reports, handbooks, fact sheets, and popular media pieces. As well, the organization hosts, conferences, courses, training, and educational workshops. CREST delivers its programs and services in field research, feasibility and impact studies, market research, certification programs, traveler’s philanthropy, and strengthening sustainable tourism and ecotourism.
Over the past decade, CREST has identified coastal and marine tourism as a central area of focus. CREST’s projects include a study of the global trends in coastal tourism, a series of “Innovators Symposiums” on coastal and marine tourism, a three-year study and documentary film of the impacts of large coastal tourism along Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, a multi-year project to build and strengthen sustainable and competitive tourism in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, field projects assessing the impacts of cruise tourism in three Central American countries, among other worthwhile projects. Growing out of a July 2015 Think Tank on Climate Change and Coastal/Marine Tourism in the Caribbean, CREST’s
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