Part three of a three-part series for Fair Tax Week 2026.
Over the first two parts of this series we made an argument and then traced a problem. The argument, in part one, was that sustainable tourism rests on three pillars that are meant to be held in balance, the environmental, the socio-cultural and the economic, and that the economic pillar has quietly become the poor relation, reduced to local hiring and purchasing while the most verifiable public measure of a company’s economic contribution, the tax it pays where it creates value, goes almost unmentioned. In part two we showed how the structure of international tourism lets value that genuinely belongs to the destination be recognised offshore, thinned out as it passes through, and parked in corporate structures that almost nobody outside a tax authority can see, while being careful to distinguish that from the legitimate margins that selling partners properly earn and tax in their own markets.
Which leaves an obvious question. The tourism industry has no shortage of sustainability certifications. Operators display them, buyers ask for them, travellers look for them. If economic contribution is a genuine pillar of sustainability, what do those certifications actually ask a company to do about tax?
So we read them. We went through the standards that matter most for tour operators and destination management companies, the GSTC Industry Criteria, Travelife, and B Corp, and looked for what each requires on tax conduct. We did this not to score points, but because we think the answer reveals something the whole industry needs to confront, ourselves included. What we found is that, with one recent and narrowly drawn exception, these standards ask little or nothing of operators on tax conduct specifically. We want to set out exactly what we found, be fair about why, and then talk about what could be done differently, because we think this is eminently fixable. We should say at the outset that this is a narrow lens. GSTC, Travelife and B Corp make valuable contributions across many other areas of sustainability, environmental management, labour standards, community engagement and more. Our focus here is only on tax conduct and tax transparency, where we think there is a real and fixable gap.
What the standards actually say
The GSTC Industry Criteria for Tour Operators are, in effect, the foundational sustainable-tourism standard, and many other certifications are built to align with them. The Global Sustainable Tourism Council also publishes well-regarded material on how its criteria map to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. You would therefore expect tax, the most direct public-finance channel through which the private sector funds those goals, to appear somewhere.
It does not. Across the entire standard there is no criterion addressing corporate tax conduct, and tax is not named once. What makes this striking is that the standard does not neglect economics in the abstract. Its very first criterion requires a company’s sustainability management system to cover, in its own words, “environmental, social, cultural, economic, quality, human rights, health and safety issues.” Economic sustainability is named explicitly, as a dimension the system must address. And yet nowhere is that economic dimension defined to include the most basic economic fact about a business: whether it pays its tax, and where.
The gaps are specific enough to point to. The standard’s legal-compliance criterion asks operators to comply with applicable legislation “including, among others, health, safety, labour and environmental aspects.” Tax is absent from that list, even though the same criterion goes on to ask that “legal requirements in all countries of operation are understood and met,” precisely the multi-country situation in which profit shifting happens. Section B, the section titled “Maximize social and economic benefits to the local community,” asks operators to support community projects, employ local people and buy locally, and offers “education, training, health and sanitation” as examples of worthwhile contribution. Those are exactly the public goods that corporate tax funds, named as things to support at the margins while the central mechanism that pays for them goes unmentioned. Even the decent-work criterion asks operators to show that “employee contracts show support for health care and social security,” which means the standard does reach into a company’s contribution to the public purse, just on the payroll side, while ignoring whether the company pays tax on its own profits. It is not so much that tax was forgotten as that the smaller, visible economic gestures were allowed to stand in for the larger, harder one. We do not read this as a flaw that discredits the standard, which does a great deal of good elsewhere. We read it as an area where a future revision could meaningfully strengthen the economic pillar it already commits to.
We should anticipate the obvious reply here, because GSTC and Travelife could both make it: that tax is covered under their general legal-compliance requirements. It is worth being clear about why that is not enough. A generic legal-compliance clause is not the same as a tax-conduct standard. It asks only that a company obey the law wherever it operates. It does not ask where profit is booked, whether tax havens are used artificially, who beneficially owns the business, or what tax is actually paid in each operating country. A company can be in perfect legal compliance everywhere, paying exactly what each jurisdiction’s rules require of the structure it has chosen, while that structure is designed precisely to leave the destination with almost nothing. Compliance asks whether you broke the rules. Responsible tax conduct asks whether the outcome is fair. They are not the same question.
Travelife, in both its Certified and its lighter Partner standard, follows the same pattern. The Travelife Certified standard is detailed and, in many areas, genuinely demanding, running to well over two hundred criteria. It maintains a careful list of legal and ethical requirements a company must track, naming anti-bribery and corruption, health, safety, human rights, labour and environmental compliance. Tax is not on the list. It requires anti-bribery and anti-corruption clauses in supplier contracts. It even includes a clause on fair competition. But it contains no requirement about tax conduct, no requirement to hold a tax policy, and no requirement to disclose anything about where profit is booked or tax is paid. It is worth sitting with that combination for a moment, not as a gotcha but as a genuine puzzle: a standard can treat bribery and corruption as competitive distortions serious enough to police through contract terms, while treating a company’s tax structure, which as we argued in part two can create competitive advantages that locally rooted operators find difficult to match, as outside its scope entirely.
B Corp is the most interesting case, and it deserves real fairness, because it is the one standard that has begun to move. In 2025, B Lab published a new version of its standards, with a later update aligning its tax requirement to GRI 207, the recognised global standard on tax transparency, including country-by-country reporting. For the first time, the standard includes explicit expectations on tax: a public policy on responsible tax, and disclosure of where profit is made and tax is paid. B Lab’s own stated reasoning closely echoes the argument we have made across this series: that tax is vital to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and is a key way for companies to contribute to their local economies. That is genuinely welcome, and we say so without reservation.
But the detail matters, and here the relevance to our industry all but disappears. In B Lab’s own published standard, the tax-policy and country-by-country-reporting requirements are marked as applying to its largest size tier and listed as “None” for every smaller category. And B Lab places a company in the lower of the two size bands indicated by its worker count and its revenue, so reaching the top tier takes more than being large on a single measure. In practice this excludes almost every tour operator and destination management company likely to seek or hold B Corp certification, including the specialist responsible-travel operators most visible in this space. There is a further twist worth noting: B Lab’s framework deliberately asks fewer requirements of service businesses than of manufacturers, on the reasoning that a service company’s footprint is lighter. A destination management company is a service business, so it sits exactly where the standard is designed to ask the least. The result is that, even under B Corp’s new and much-discussed tax standard, effectively every tour operator that is or could be a certified B Corp can comply in full without ever publishing a tax policy or a single line of country-by-country reporting.
Giving credit where it belongs
We want to be careful here, because it would be easy to read B Lab’s recent move as the industry finally leading on tax. It is fairer to say the industry is finally beginning to follow.
The tools to take tax seriously have existed for years. The Global Reporting Initiative published GRI 207, its dedicated standard on tax, back in 2019. The Fair Tax Foundation has offered a complete and rigorous framework for assessing responsible corporate tax conduct for multi-nationals since 2021. These are mature, credible instruments, and the real credit for building the responsible-tax movement belongs to organisations like these, and to the Tax Justice Network and others who have made the case for two decades. B Lab’s new provision, welcome as it is, is essentially a careful, late and size-limited adoption of work those organisations did years ago. We make this point not to diminish a positive step, but because it matters who the genuine standard-setters are, and because it shows something hopeful: when a certification body finally decides tax belongs in its standard, it does not have to invent anything. The frameworks are sitting there, tested and ready to use.
That is the constructive heart of what we want to say. The silence of the tourism standards on tax is no longer a tooling problem. The tools exist, so the omission has become a design choice, and design choices can be revisited.
We should meet one honest objection head on. A destination can collect its fair share and still spend it poorly, and some will say there is little point worrying about whether tax is paid if it might be misused once it arrives. But these are two separate problems, and they happen in sequence. A government cannot misspend revenue it never received. Whether tax is collected at all comes first; how well it is then used comes second, and the second question only becomes live once the first is answered. Fix the collection, and the conversation about good governance can actually begin. Leave it unfixed, and there is nothing to govern.
And the second problem is not one a company can solve by paying less tax. How a destination spends its revenue is a matter for the people who live there and, in democratic countries, for the electorate they answer to. It is not for a foreign-owned operator to decide that a country’s spending does not meet its standards and to treat that as licence to contribute less. A company that quietly minimises what it pays because it doubts how the money will be used is not exercising prudence; it is substituting its own judgment for that of the people whose country it profits from. Our argument is only about the first problem, the one the company itself controls and an outsider can actually verify, which is exactly why it is the right place for a sustainability standard to start. If our industry is serious about economic sustainability, and not just the parts of sustainability that photograph well, then fair tax conduct cannot remain the one question nobody asks. It may be the most important question of all.
What good looks like, and that it is achievable
The Fair Tax Mark, awarded by the Fair Tax Foundation, is what taking tax seriously looks like in practice. To carry it, a business commits to paying the right amount of tax, in the right place, at the right time, according to both the letter and the spirit of the law. It must hold a published tax policy that explicitly rejects the artificial use of tax havens. It must be transparent about the profits it makes and the taxes it pays, including country-by-country reporting where it operates across borders. It must be open about who really owns and benefits from the business, the beneficial-ownership transparency that, as we saw in part two, is so often the missing piece. And its conduct is reviewed over time and independently verified, rather than self-declared.
The single most important feature, for our purposes, is that the Fair Tax Mark applies regardless of company size. The principles a large multinational must satisfy are the principles a small, single-country operator must satisfy, scaled to its scope. There is no threshold below which paying your fair share stops mattering, which is exactly right, because a destination does not feel the loss of tax revenue any less keenly when the company avoiding it happens to be small. The existence of a credible, size-neutral standard is the proof that none of this is impractical. It can be done, at any scale, today.
Our announcement, and our own work
This week, during Fair Tax Week 2026, Tripseed has been awarded the Fair Tax Mark, becoming the first business in the world to earn Fair Tax accreditation under the newly published National Business Standard, designed for businesses anywhere in the world which operate in a single country. The Fair Tax Foundation welcomed the accreditation as a first for the tourism sector.
“Discussions about sustainable tourism can sometimes focus on what visitors leave behind environmentally and socially, without asking whether destinations retain a fair share of the economic value they create,” said Jamie Boswell, Head of Accreditation at the Fair Tax Foundation. “Responsible tax conduct is fundamental to genuine sustainability because it helps ensure that communities have the resources to invest in their own future. We are delighted to welcome Tripseed and hope their example encourages others to demonstrate the same commitment to transparency and fairness.”
We are grateful for those words, but we do not share any of this to congratulate ourselves. We say it because the gap this series has described is real, and because we think the most useful thing a small company can do with a finding like ours is not to point at it, but to step into it and show that the alternative is possible. Being independently verified on our tax conduct does not make us a better company than our peers in every respect. It makes us a transparent one on the question that matters most for economic sustainability, and we would like a great deal of company. We do not suggest that businesses without the Fair Tax Mark are acting irresponsibly. Many pay their tax conscientiously without it. What the accreditation provides is one independent, verifiable way of demonstrating that conduct, rather than asking anyone to take it on trust.
We also want to head off the objection we expect to hear first, that this kind of transparency is a luxury only well-resourced companies can afford. Our own experience was the opposite. It was the least onerous sustainability disclosure we have ever produced. We began by compiling our disclosure to the published GRI 207 standard, which is clear, well-structured and entirely possible to follow without a tax department or specialist advisers, neither of which a company our size has. When we then submitted for the Fair Tax Mark, the Foundation’s scorecard let us build on that strong GRI 207 foundation to reach a comprehensive, industry-leading disclosure with little difficulty and very little additional resource. The reason it was so manageable is simple: the underlying information already exists. It sits in the annual accounts that national governments require every legitimate business to file anyway. The work is not in generating data; it is in choosing to compile and publish it. If a single-country operator can do this from its standard statutory filings, an international group with a dedicated finance function and enterprise systems cannot credibly claim it is too hard.
It is also why, separately, we have been developing our own work on economic transparency through our Economic Distribution Disclosure Initiative (EDDI): a way of making visible how much of the value a trip generates is genuinely retained in the destination, rather than leaving the question, as part two described it, effectively unknowable. The Fair Tax Mark verifies that we pay our tax properly. Our own work is about helping the wider industry, and the travellers and buyers who depend on it, actually see economic contribution rather than take it on faith. We will have more to say about that in due course.
An invitation, not an attack
We would rather end this series by opening a door than by closing one, so we will put what we have learned as a set of invitations.
To the certification bodies, including those whose current silence on tax we have described: the frameworks already exist, they are credible, and they are ready. GRI 207 and the Fair Tax Foundation’s standard can be integrated as a baseline expectation rather than left out altogether, and crucially, without the size thresholds that conveniently exclude the entire tourism sector. A sustainability standard that is silent on tax is, by its own logic, incomplete, because tax is how the private sector funds the development goals these standards exist to serve. We would be glad to work with any of them on how this could be done well, and we mean that as colleagues, not critics.
To travel buyers and to travellers: the most useful question you can ask an operator that markets itself as sustainable is a simple one. What do you pay in tax in the countries you operate in, and has anyone independent checked? A certification that does not require an answer cannot give you one, and asking the question is itself a way of moving the market toward the answer.
To our fellow operators: because the Fair Tax Mark applies at any size, the argument that this is only for the giants does not hold. If a company our size can meet this standard, larger and better-resourced operators certainly can. We are not the first to care about this, and we very much hope not to be the last to act on it. The invitation is genuinely open, and we would welcome the company.
And for travellers, this is not really about accounting at all. It is about whether the places they love to visit keep enough of the value their visit creates to maintain the infrastructure, protect the natural environments, and support the communities that made those places worth travelling to in the first place. A destination that cannot fund its own future is, in the end, a destination that slowly loses the things that drew people to it. That is why where the value comes to rest is not a technical question. It is the whole of it.
This is Fair Tax Week. For more than a decade the Fair Tax Foundation has made it possible for businesses to say, with pride, what they contribute to the societies they operate in.
This week, for the first time, an international tourism company can stand alongside the businesses answering it openly. We hope we are the first of many.
This is the final part of a three-part series for Fair Tax Week 2026. Part one set out Thailand’s fiscal trajectory and why corporate income tax matters for the region. Part two examined how the structure of international tourism extracts value from host destinations before tax can apply.