Green tourism: Killhope, Lochranza Youth Hostel

Green Tourism is actually about a number of things. The very basic one is about managing your business better. Bottom line, really important, just to be more aware of what you do and doing it better. It's obviously about resource efficiency, in saving money, it's about waste management, it's about natural and cultural conservation and biodiversity. It encompasses all of those issues. But it also includes things like social responsibility and equality, about looking after your staff, about your people and people you work with. It's about supporting the local community and the local economy, and probably most importantly, it's about making your guests happy. It's about providing an enhanced quality experience by making sure that people go away from you feeling happy, not feeling guilty, have being on holiday with you, have actually really enjoyed themselves and want to come back. More importantly, it's also about future-proofing your business. That's really important in today's market to know that you're going to be here in the future and that you're currently sustainable yourself.

I'm taking us through the darkest parts of County Durham, where there's a fantastic organization. There's a lead mining museum. It has quite a lot of grounds, so it's very lucky that it's able to have not just the museum itself but actually quite a lot of grounds. They've put in some amazing things. Fantastic composting toilets, which if you've never used, you should try it, they don't smell, it's very clean and it's a great way of showing people that you don't have to use a lot of water and energy to deal with what goes down the toilet. They've also put in LED lights and a condensing boiler. But obviously, a big part of their guests is the educational side, get lots of school groups. They've actually developed an ecology backpack, so that when you arrive on site you can actually collect an ecology backpack with your family or with your school group and in it, it has identification books, it has little petri dishes, so you can do the pond dipping and see the insects and whatever that's in the pond and it actually helps the school children to actually understand the ecology of the area as well as the history and whatever. I think actually one of the great things that Killhope has done, considering it's a lead mining museum and it's in quite a rural area, is they've identified that there's a problem or a real issue with the local youths in the area not having the opportunity perhaps to get as much training as they'd like. So what they've done is they've opened the center up as a volunteering center. So they encourage the young people to come to the museums, help work with the school groups or help with the biodiversity, helping with grants, agents and things like that and allowing them to actually mature as people themselves. That's been a fantastic way of actually giving back to the community, as well as actually also providing access for underprivileged children and people who perhaps don't have the opportunity to visit these kind of things on a regular basis. Obviously, because it's a museum, they are very much about promoting the crafts, the music, and actually education on how miners used to live in the olden days. It's a fantastic, exemplary business in terms of working with the community as well as with children and with the culture.