30 years ago, Costa Rica launched one of the world’s earliest government-led national programs to measure sustainability across tourism businesses.

Back in 1995, both government officials and hoteliers already saw the need to make the country’s booming tourism industry operate more responsibly. Calling a business sustainable was not enough. They wanted to measure and verify its practices. So in 1997, the Certification for Sustainable Tourism (CST) program was launched.

Nearly three decades later, I interviewed Mariana Garita, head of tourism sustainability at the Costa Rican Tourism Institute and a lead representative of Costa Rica’s CST Program .

I also spoke with hotel operators and other tourism businesses who were there from the beginning. I asked what CST has achieved, what sustainability challenges Costa Rica must address next and how the program should evolve.

According to Garita, CST grew out of cooperation between the government and the industry, since both were already thinking about tourism’s environmental impact.

“The design and creation process was a joint vision between the hoteliers at that time and the Costa Rica Tourism Institute team,” she says during a video interview.

In its early years, “the CST focused primarily on how hotels could implement sustainable tourism practices,” Garita explains. “It focused mostly on environmental management—how businesses handled water use, energy consumption andwaste management.”

They started with these, since they were the most visible and measurable effects tourism businesses could address. Therefore, the CST aimed to give hotels practical standards for tracking and reducing their environmental impact.

Hans Pfister, co-founder and president of Cayuga Collection and president of the Costa Rican Ecotourism and Sustainable Tourism Chamber (CANAECO), was one of the first hoteliers on board.

“I have been involved in the CST even before it became the CST. I implemented a sustainability program at a hotel in Costa Rica in 1995, and the ICT came to visit and learn what I was doing,” says Pfister during a video interview.

He says the program grew from work already underway in the private sector. Hotel owners and tourism companies tested practices, while the Costa Rican Tourism Institute turned those early efforts into a national framework.

“One of my hotels was the first hotel to be certified and another ( Arenas del Mar ) was the first five-star hotel to get five leaves,” he recalls.

His relationship with CST was not always easy. Pfister later withdrew all his hotels from the program because he believed it had become outdated. He returned after CST was revised.

Why CST Had To Change After 20 Years

Over time, Garita says, it became clear that environmental criteria alone could not provide a complete picture. “The framework had to focus on all the dimensions of sustainability,” she says.

CST underwent its first major overhaul in 2016. They introduced the new CST 2.0 standard on April 25, 2018, which replaced the five-leaf rating with Basic and Elite levels and expanded the number of eligible tourism sectors.

After the revision, the CST included social, cultural, operational and accessibility criteria beyond environmental.

“We also wanted it to be tailor-made for tourism companies,” Garita says. “They all start from the same baseline, measuring basic criteria, and then we add specific criteria for their category.”

Today, CST covers 14 types of tourism businesses, including hotels, tour operators, restaurants, transportation and car rental companies, protected areas, thermal springs and venues for conferences and events.

In 2025, the Costa Rican Tourism Institute revised CST again, reducing the evaluation from 355 questions to 210. Garita says this change made the process clearer and more accessible, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses, without reducing its rigor. Certification is now also valid for three years instead of two.

CST Is A Management Tool And Not A Marketing Label

CST is voluntary and free for Costa Rican businesses, but companies still invest considerable time collecting evidence, documenting practices and preparing for an audit.

However, Garita argues that the work involved can also improve how a company operates.

‘The interesting fact is that these programs help companies organize themselves internally,” Garita says. “It contributes to improving the culture of the organization and enhancing teamwork.”

Once those practices become part of the company’s daily operations, she adds, completing the next certification or renewal becomes easier.

Pfister agrees that CST works best as a management tool rather than a marketing label.

“I don’t think that the CST is going to sell me one single room night more in my hotels,” he says. “It’s more of an internal tool to make sure that you’re doing things right.”

For a company starting its sustainability work, he says, the assessment provides a guide and helps ensure that different areas of the business are covered.

He also believes the fact that CST is free gives it more credibility.

“You’re not buying a label,” he says. ‘You’re not going like, ‘Okay, I give you 2,000 bucks and you give me that stamp so that I can put it on my website, and now I’m good. I don’t have to worry about anything anymore.’ This is more the real thing.”

Pfister has experienced the process from both sides. His hotels undergo CST inspections, but he is also part of CST’s Technical Verification Commission via CANAECO, which reviews audit results and decides whether to grant certification.

“There’s a whole committee, and the inspectors are very strict,” Pfister says. “It’s not a walk in the park.”

The committee also includes representatives from the University of Costa Rica and the country’s ministries of environment and culture.

Can Small Businesses Keep Up?

Even though CST is free, small, rural, and community-based businesses still find it challenging to obtain it. Not because they aren’t operating responsibly, but because they don’t have employees available to document it.

“If a small business wants to be part of this certification, probably the time that they need to invest in documenting and generating evidence will be hard,” Garita says. “They are used to working with sustainable practices, but usually they don’t have the evidence.”

ICT offers individual guidance to businesses that are not yet ready to apply. “We can have one-on-one sessions with companies and businesses so that they can introduce themselves to the evaluation tool,” Garita says. “Later on, at some point, they will be welcome to start in the program.”

Pfister sees this problem within his own company. Cayuga manages five hotels in Costa Rica, but only two are CST certified, because the others are very small. These are properties with eight and 15 rooms.

“I can guarantee you that those hotels are as sustainable or more sustainable than the others,” Pfister says. “But documenting it and getting everything signed, the letters and this and that, I just don’t have the bandwidth for that.”

This points to an important limitation. Certification numbers do not capture every tourism business working sustainably in Costa Rica. Currently, 159 tourism businesses hold CST certification across the 14 categories. For context, Costa Rica had an estimated 3,095 lodging establishments alone in 2025, excluding vacation rentals.

CST can evaluate how an individual company manages water, waste, employees and community relationships. It cannot control the combined effect of tourism and real estate development across an entire destination.

“While the CST successfully audited individual businesses, it was never designed to regulate aggregate regional growth,” Pfister says.

He points to Pacific coast destinations including Tamarindo, Nosara, Santa Teresa and the Papagayo Peninsula, where development is adding pressure to water supplies, sewage systems, waste management and housing.

Short-term rentals are a particular concern. They add tourism inventory but frequently operate outside the sustainability requirements applied to hotels and other established tourism businesses.

Pedro Belmar, managing director and co-owner of Hotel Belmar , the first hotel in Monteverde to receive CST’s highest five-leaf rating, raises the same issue. “Costa Rica’s next sustainability challenge is managing tourism growth in a way that strengthens communities rather than displacing them,” he says in an email interview.

He argues that the rapid expansion of short-term rentals can place additional pressure on housing, water, infrastructure and local character.

“Accountability must extend across every lodging model so that tourism continues to protect both the ecosystems and the communities that make Costa Rica extraordinary,” he adds.

Stephanie Sheehy, the Costa Rican-born co-founder and general manager of Il Viaggio Travel , a tour operator that currently holds CST Elite status, says sustainability should consider “who can participate, who can travel, who can work in tourism, who benefits from tourism, and who is still being left behind.”

“Inclusion and accessibility must become measurable, verifiable and actionable, supported by clear standards and guidelines,” Sheehy argues.

What CST Has Achieved In Nearly 30 Years

Garita says CST gives companies more than a label. It provides a system they can use to examine their operations, reduce costs and identify where they need to improve.

Jesús Parrilla, founder and CEO of Experiential Hospitality Group , who has spent more than two decades working across outdoor hospitality, conservation and experience design, sees another practical result.

“CST’s greatest achievement was not the certification itself, but helping Costa Rica understand that tourism and conservation could strengthen one another,” Parrilla says.

“Projects like Lapa Rios, El Remanso, Bosque del Cabo and Punta Islita demonstrated that protecting the region’s landscapes and restoring depleted land could become economically viable through ecotourism, done in partnership with local communities,” he says.

Sheehy notes that “CST has given tourism businesses clear guidelines for improvement, promoted a culture of continuous progress, and helped position Costa Rica internationally as a destination where tourism should respect nature, communities and the places where it operates.”

Kenneth Hidalgo, general manager of Playa Cativo Lodge , who also holds a master’s degree in Sustainable Tourism Management, agrees with Sheehy. “I believe CST’s greatest achievement is not only the standards and certifications it has created, but also the culture of sustainability it has helped build within Costa Rica’s tourism industry,” Hidalgo says in an email interview.

Garita says CST is now concentrating on “expanding the reach of the framework and also deepening the accountability of what is measured.”

That means bringing more small, rural and community-based businesses into the program while moving from recording practices to tracking results over time.

The next phase may also require a broader definition of sustainability.

Parrilla says CST helped demonstrate that conservation and tourism could support each other. However, he believes the country now needs “far greater and more dependable conservation finance through tourism itself, rather than relying primarily on philanthropy.”