It’s been a while since I shared any news from the world of responsibletravel.com so here goes…

Responsible Tourism Awards 2008

First up, we had a great time on World Responsible Tourism Day (12 Nov) celebrating the winners of our Virgin Holidays Responsible Tourism Awards 2008.

This is the 5th year of the Responsible Tourism Awards and they’ve been getting bigger and better each year – we received nearly 2000 nominations this year and around 500 people crammed into the Awards ceremony room at World Travel Market to see the winners announced.

And the Overall Winner was… drum roll please!… NEW ZEALAND!

New Zealand took away the honours for Overall Winner, as well as scooping Best Destination, as the judges felt the destination had proved to the world ‘that it is possible to develop a national strategy which uses tourism to help make better places to live and to visit.’ (Read more)

To discover all the winners in this year’s Awards, visit www.responsibletourismawards.com or browse through our wonderful magazine for the responsible traveller, r:travel which features all the winners and highly commendeds in depth.

You can even watch a short film on the Responsible Tourism Awards by BBC World News’ fast:track team.

IKnowaGreatPlace.com – new online travel community

My next nugget of news is a rather exclusive one. responsibletravel.com has started a brand new travel community that hasn’t yet launched to the general public but all Green Girls are very welcome!

They’re encouraging visitors to share their top tips and local travel secrets to make it easier for all of us to travel with respect for the local environment and culture while having a fab unique and authentic experience.

Register for the community and start to share your travel secrets, post your travel pics, create a travel diary or even look for a travel companion.

Not forgetting to add me as a friend (!) and check out my favourite place in the world!

And as for my final piece of RT news… well, I think that’s enough for now. You’ll have to come back next week for that one

Take care,

Katie