2009 Virgin Holidays Responsible Tourism Award winners announced

The 2009 winners of the Virgin Holidays Responsible Tourism Awards were announced this morning in London as part of the celebration of World Travel Market's third annual WTM World Responsible Tourism Day. Sponsored by Virgin Holidays, the awards are organized by responsibletravel.com together with partners The Daily Telegraph, WTM, and Geographical Magazine.

This year's overall winner was New Zealand-based Whale Watch Kaikoura. Announcing the reason for their selection, the panel of judges said: "Rarely do we see a tourism initiative developed from the ground up by a local community to such a successful and grand scale – growing from modest beginnings to securing in a joint venture with Sea World on the Gold Coast of Australia to provide their whale watching. Whale Watch Kaikoura provides consistently responsible whale watching tours with minimal impacts. The founding of the enterprise by four Maori families has demonstrated that the local Maori community can not only grow a considerable tourism business, but, more significantly, use that business to buy back their ancestral land for the benefit of the indigenous people and their cultural identity."

Read more at Seattle International Travel Examiner