Accréditation Sans Frontières

ASF Tourism — Version 3 (Final), September 2026

Why ASF Tourism

A guest dies of carbon monoxide poisoning at a resort. A guest is scalded in a shower that ran 20 degrees hotter than it should. A guest is electrocuted in a bathroom with no ground-fault protection. None of these are rare. All of them are preventable. And almost nobody is independently checking for any of them.

The gap, stated plainly

Over 200 tourism certification schemes exist worldwide. Nearly all of them certify the same thing: environmental and social sustainability. Green Globe, EarthCheck, GSTC, Travelife, Green Key — real, serious organisations, doing real work. None of them independently verify whether the water is safe to drink, whether the kitchen prevents cross-contamination, whether a carbon monoxide detector sits near the pool heater, or whether staff on the night shift actually know CPR.

GSTC’s own Hotel Standard states plainly that health, safety, and security “fall under the responsibility of specialized authorities and are outside the scope of the standard set.” That’s an honest admission, not a flaw in GSTC’s work — but it leaves exactly the gap this page is about.

Photo by Chrissy on Unsplash, free to use under the Unsplash License

This isn’t theoretical. Here’s what’s actually happened.

CARBON MONOXIDE

905 U.S. lodging guests poisoned by CO 2005–2018, 22 deaths — pool and water heaters a leading cause. 2024–25: a 14-year-old at a Costa Rica resort, three women in one Belize hotel. Almost no country requires detectors by law.

WATER SAFETY

A Legionnaires’ outbreak traced to the Sheraton Atlanta’s water system sickened dozens of guests and killed one, confirmed by Georgia’s Department of Public Health. The hotel closed for weeks. One untreated water system, one conference, one death.

SCALDING

A 72-year-old guest died from scalding at a Marriott-branded hotel in California — water measured at 134–136°F against a 120°F legal limit. Roughly 3,800 U.S. injuries and 34 deaths every year from excessively hot tap water alone. The fix costs about $30.

ELECTROCUTION

The U.S. CPSC found ground-fault protection could prevent over two-thirds of home electrocutions — most commonly a faulty water heater, directly relevant to electric shower heaters common across ASF Tourism’s target markets. Added after a real, personally reported incident.

FALLS

Slip-and-fall is the single highest-frequency guest liability claim at hotels — U.S. settlements of $30,000–$250,000 per claim. One documented case: a traumatic brain injury from a bathroom slip with no grab bar present.

MEDICAL EMERGENCY RESPONSE

A San Diego jury ordered Hyatt to pay $15.5 million in July 2026 after staff failed to check on a diabetic guest for nearly 24 hours past checkout — found in diabetic ketoacidosis, she died the next day. Their own written procedure required a wellness check; staff simply extended her reservation.

FOOD POISONING

A mother and her 8-year-old son died after eating from the buffet at a Dominican Republic all-inclusive resort in December 2023. The $10 million lawsuit cites poor sanitary conditions in food prep areas and staff untrained to handle the emergency that followed.

BED BUGS

A Ventura, California jury awarded two guests $2 million in June 2025 — including $1 million in punitive damages — after a hotel relocated them to a second room that was also infested, despite years of online reviews warning management about the problem.

Full sourcing for these and the other 72 of 80 scored criteria is on the Evidence Base.

The demand is already here. It already decides who gets the booking.

Every incident on this page is a reason a facility should want independent verification. The numbers below are the reason it has to: travellers are not waiting for an incident to happen before they act — they are already screening for proof of safety before they book, and the data shows exactly how that screening changes a facility’s bookings.

What certification actually changes about a booking

This is the part a facility owner should read most carefully: these aren’t stated preferences from a survey about hypothetical hotels. They’re measured choices between real options, one certified and one not.

Figures from Tripadvisor/Hospitality Net research and Valpas‘s own published summary; full citations on the Evidence Base.

Five years of data say this isn’t a passing mood

2020 — 85% of consumers wanted hotels to adopt enhanced safety protocols; 57% of US travellers said they’d pay more for enhanced cleaning; 48% said it would influence which hotel they chose (GlobalData; Honeywell/YouGov).

2021 — 93%+ of travellers expected a hotel to proactively outline its safety measures; 80%+ said they’d check a hotel’s protocols before booking; 57%+ said they’d pay more specifically for certified clean, not just clean (Hospitality Net/Knowcross).

2025–2026 — half of travellers now rank safety as their #1 destination priority, ahead of cost; 35% cite a major health concern when travelling; only 51% say they bother to research it themselves before booking (Global Rescue) — which is precisely the gap a visible, independent certification closes for the other 49%.

COVID-19 forced the industry to look. Then everyone looked away.

In 2020, for the first time at scale, tourism had to confront health and safety seriously. Three real responses followed. UN Tourism issued Global Guidelines to Restart Tourism — but the guidelines themselves point operators to WHO‘s own interim guidance; UN Tourism gives direction, it doesn’t independently verify any specific facility follows it. WTTC launched the “Safe Travels” stamp — the most recognised safety mark in travel, and by its own description, self-assessed: an operator fills in a form. Five years on, guidance exists, a self-assessed stamp exists, and the world’s leading sustainability standard explicitly declines to cover this ground.

What never arrived is the thing healthcare has had since well before COVID: an independent body, structurally separated from the facilities it checks, verifying real evidence on-site against a published standard.

A model that already works, applied where it’s needed

ASF has run exactly this model for healthcare facilities since its founding in Paris in 2020 — real published standards, real on-site verification, real structural separation between the body that sets the standard and the body that decides who passes. In October 2026, ASF began adapting that same proven model to tourism and hospitality.

The result, built out across this site, isn’t a concept: it’s 80 scored criteria across 11 Standards, each with a real citation, a concrete pass/fail example, and — where a genuine skill is required, not just a document — a named training code already wired into a self-assessment tool anyone can try today, for free, right now.

We’ve been working on this standard since 2021

This work began in March 2021, when Sakartvelo’s Certified Guides Association (SCGA), the professional body for Georgia’s licensed tour guides, came to Accréditation Sans Frontières with a challenge: tour guides, hotels and restaurants had no way to show travellers they were genuinely safe to visit. On 9 May 2021, ASF — through the Public Health Institute of Georgia — held its first formal conversation with SCGA about it. Through discussions between ASF’s own team and public-health experts, an approach took shape: adapt the accreditation model ASF already used at hospital level to tourism, drawing on the same experience that shaped it there — earlier lessons from SARS, and the goal of being ready before COVID could repeat itself. Together, the two organisations drafted the first version: a set of COVID-era accreditation concepts for the facilities travellers rely on most — a COVID-Accredited Tour, Restaurant, Hospital, and Transport designation.

It wasn’t only paperwork. On 25 October 2021, Prof. Giorgi Pkhakadze and SCGA Director Giorgi Darsimelia met in person at Castle in Old Town, Tbilisi, to work through the accreditation concepts together — SCGA’s own involvement was the first help ASF received from any association anywhere in building out what became its first version of a tourism standard.

The initiative was also taken public from the start, with several articles and TV programmes at the national level in Georgia — including a one-to-one interview with Professor Giorgi Pkhakadze on Vakho Khuzmiashvili’s Tavisufali Sivrtse (“Free Space”) programme, broadcast live on Georgian national television on 5 May 2021.

A named partner, a dated meeting, a public broadcast: the groundwork — and ASF’s gratitude to SCGA as the first association willing to put in that work — both date to 2021.

That first version was piloted at the end of 2021 — including directly at Castle in Old Town (La Résidence) in Tbilisi, owned by ASF’s founder and disclosed here for the same reason as other founder connections elsewhere on this site — and tested against the issues that only come up once real staff try to follow it, including a second property that failed its assessment and asked not to be identified. That refusal is itself the point: a standard only means something if a real facility can fail it.

Soon afterward, ASF entered its partnership with Accreditation Canada, and the team’s main focus shifted to building out the Hospital accreditation standard first. The tourism work slowed for another reason too: once the acute phase of COVID passed, much of the sector wanted to put it behind them rather than keep working on it, this included. The standard was still updated in 2023, then piloted and revised again. What’s live today is the third version, completed in 2026.

What changed is October 2026. An outbreak of Ebola (Bundibugyo virus disease) that began in the Democratic Republic of Congo has now reached Kenya, which confirmed its first imported case on 5 October 2026 — months after Uganda’s own outbreak, traced to the same source, was declared over. It’s the same pattern that slowed this work the first time: a region moves on from an outbreak, then has to relearn the lesson when the next one arrives. That’s also why ASF is choosing to start this accreditation work in East Africa first: these are Partner States with recent, direct experience managing outbreaks of their own — Rwanda’s 2024 Marburg response among them — and the public-health systems already built to do it again.

A track record, not a pitch deck

ASF Tourism is led by the same team that has run ASF’s own healthcare accreditation programme since founding in Paris in 2020, anchored by its sister institute in Tbilisi, the Public Health Institute of Georgia (PHIG, founded 2011) — the recognised national partner office of a leading international healthcare accreditation body operating in Georgia. This is an existing, working verification operation applying a proven method to a new sector, not a new team learning accreditation for the first time.

Source: PHIG/ASF internal records — figures as of October 2026.

What ASF Tourism is not

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