The Global Leader in Vegan Hospitality & Tourism Certification

Does your company aim to serve all guests with excellence and ease?

Has your hotel achieved sustainability certifications, or made climate friendly changes to your operations?

Do your restaurants or culinary offerings include plant based options?

Then you might be eligible for Vegan Hospitality’s Global Hospitality & Tourism Certification.

In our current travel climate, guests are seeking accommodations that can both meet their dining needs as well as align with their values.

We certify travel accommodations that are vegan friendly or fully vegan, including:

• Hotels, Resorts, & Hospitality Groups

• Boutique Hotels, Lodges and B&Bs

• Retreat Centers, Cruise Ships & Yachts

Certification by Vegan Hospitality is the highest standard in the industry, ensuring that your vegan guests have an experience that is equivalent in quality to what your traditional guests experience at your accommodation. Read these highlighted achievements from some of our certified properties.

Do you represent a hotel group? Learn more about our corporate strategic planning and certification for groups here.

The certification process includes:

• Easy, streamlined, free online auditing (apply below) from an independent third party auditor

• A data secure, third-party verified certificate and badge you can use in your marketing

• Vegan Guest Services online staff training course to boost your employee professional development and use for onboarding new employees. Bonus: Employees also receive an individual certificate that is compliant with LinkedIn Certification sharing!

• A meeting with a certified consultant to guide your team in building a strategic plan for achieving or enhancing your plant forward and climate friendly accommodation goals

• An interactive Strategic Planning Workbook with resources to build your vegan guest strategy

• Promotional support to the vegan travel community

Once certified, you will have access to use our certification logo on your website, social media, and marketing materials. Our logo was branded with discretion in mind, to support accommodations that are not targeting 100% vegan guests, and at the same time our logo is well established within the vegan community. With 5 years of leading the vegan hospitality industry and trainings that have reached 25 countries and counting, guests “in the know” will be attracted to your properties for your inclusive practices. We use a trusted third party service for our certification platform, ensuring data secure servers and verifiable unique QR code IDs for certified properties.

Applying is free and your membership dues of $495 USD are requested only once you receive your certification status.

This is a global certification, with auditors working across the globe and virtually. Our application is currently available in English, however auditing and consulting conversations are offered in several languages.

Apply now by completing the application below. It should only take you about 10-15 minutes.

Not sure if you qualify? Fill out the application anyway, and we’ll let you know. It’s free to apply and if we receive feedback from the auditor that you do not yet qualify, they will include notes that can point you in the right direction of what further steps you made need to take to get your accommodation certified.

Please apply for one property at a time. Would you like to get your whole hotel group certified, or pilot this at select properties? Contact us to set up a call so we can discuss your needs. Email Meredith Marin at meredith@veganhospitality.com with any questions or requests.

Certification Application

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the certification provide beyond just being certified? 

Being certified includes: 

• A certificate that is third-party verified, that we encourage hotels to print and display on site. 

• A digital certification badge that can be promoted on your website. The badge is discreet in that it has only the "VH" and not the word vegan so that vegan guests can identify it but it doesn't confuse traditional guests into thinking that you are a vegan hotel.

• Our signature Vegan Hospitality Guest Services training video that can be offered to all employees. Once employees watch the training, they also receive their own certificate that can be added as a credential to their LinkedIn profile (this is done via the verification site, and they will receive a personalized ID number in order to do this). This is for all employees, not just F&B, as we refer to interdepartmental vegan standards in the training. The employee’s certification never expires, so this is a professional development opportunity and resume boost for them. Their certificate will have your hotel's name on it so when they share their certificate via social media (as our digital verification process will prompt them to do), your hotel will be advertised each time.

• A strategic planning consultation from an independent consultant in our network who is trained in guiding hotels through the program’s strategic planning workbook. Your consultant will guide your team to set actionable goals for continuous improvement in vegan guest services across different departments. 

Why does our certification get renewed annually?

We require yearly audits for the purpose of quality control to keep our certification program at the highest standard in the industry. Because your menus may change, you may lose and gain staff members throughout the year, and because consultants work with you to set, achieve, and evaluate strategic planning goals, we must have an independent third party audit you each year in order to renew your certification.

Is this a sustainability certification?

We consider this certification to be a Guest Experience Certification with sustainability benefits. Our goals align with the Global Sustainable Tourism Council’s criteria in staff engagement, customer experience, accurate promotion, access for all, environmentally preferable purchasing, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity conservation, wildlife interactions, and animal welfare. Here you can see the full list of GSTC criteria for sustainability certifications for hotels and accommodations.

What is included in promotion to the vegan community? 

Upon being certified, we request photos and/or use of your hotel's logo to promote you to the vegan community. We will do this via our website, social media, as well as share lists with the vegan travel agents in our network. We speak about certified properties when we are guests on podcasts, and we include them in press releases and interviews. Ultimately, the more you send us in the form of photos, case examples, and success stories, the more easily we can share your property with our network.

Our long term goal is to have our certification featured on booking sites like booking.com for example as they now require third party verification for certifications, and we are currently the only organization in the world certifying vegan friendly hotels. This is a future goal and we share this vision with you so you understand what we are working towards. 

We are curious about the impact this certification will have on our hotel. We've had experiences in the past where certifications didn't always bring tangible benefits. We want to make sure this isn't just another marketing scheme but something that enhances our guest experience.

The certification process will immediately enhance your guest experience because all of your staff will be trained in vegan guest services. This means that all employees will be trained to communicate appropriately to vegan guests to make these guests feel most comfortable and welcomed. They will clearly understand the difference between vegan, vegetarian, plant based, gluten free and other dietary allergies and requests, and learn ways to best respond to customer questions and feedback to gain positive reviews.

Also included in this process is a 1 time meeting with a consultant scheduled at your convenience. During this meeting, the consultant will walk your team through a strategic planning guide that helps your hotel set goals related to indicators that improve service to vegan guests. Themes in strategic planning include culinary, housekeeping (rooms/furniture/cleaning supplies), marketing to vegan guests, animal welfare and community service, food waste management, sustainability & CO2 reduction. Setting goals in these areas are incentivized in that achieving animal welfare goals within the year will reduce the price of certification renewal for the following year. 

Will our hotel be featured on popular vegan apps that travelers use to find vegan friendly spots to eat?

One of the indicators you can choose on our strategic planning guide is to list your hotel on vegan travel apps, and your assigned certified consultant will be happy to help you set this up during your meeting if you need support with this. Our guide also includes “how to” instructions and tips for showcasing your offering to gain top reviews from vegan guests.

Our menu is seasonal and local, which means that we don’t have a standard menu to send to you. Can we still be certified?

Yes, please send us a few sample menus that you have used within the past year.

Could you give us an idea of the effort required to obtain the certification? We want to know if it aligns with our goals.

Submitting the application should only take about 10-15 minutes and it's done via the online form: www.veganhospitality.com/certified -- applying and being audited is free. Our certification calculation of your menu options will depend on the average length of your guests stay that you report on the application. Once the auditor verifies that you qualify for certification, you will receive an email with the steps to accept your certification, which means paying the invoice and accepting the certificate and certification badge from our certificate validation partner. You will receive the staff training video which you can send to your employees at your convenience. We even include an email template to assist you in sending it out to your staff. You will then schedule the strategic planning meeting with a consultant at your convenience. We are here via email to answer any questions throughout the year, and we will check in with you mid-year as well as when it’s time for your annual renewal. 

Who acts as auditors for the certification applications?

We hire auditors from our network of trained consultants who each has their own independently registered business. They do not work for Vegan Hospitality, although we support them by listing them on our website. The consultants who have opted in to be auditors have received a training course to understand the requirements of this certification program. We do our best to pair auditors with hotels based on region for the most culturally appropriate auditing experience.

How does this certification show that we are serious about welcome vegan guests, and not just “veganwashing”?

Similar to “greenwashing” where companies make sustainability pledges or claims without proving a significant environmental impact, many companies are guilty of “veganwashing.” Veganwashing occurs when a company adds a basic plant based option to their menu (like a plant based burger for example) with the main purpose to increase their image as a trendy or ethical or sustainable company. They market themselves as a vegan friendly establishment, when in reality they are unable to fully accommodate vegan guests. Our certification aims to combat veganwashing by upholding the highest standard in the industry for vegan friendly properties, essentially setting the bar and establishing credible global indicators that hotels and other accommodations can work toward to ensure that they are effectively attracting vegan guests. This is why our certification includes more than just a certificate and a badge, and also includes an easy to implement interdepartmental staff training plus a live meeting with a certified independent consultant to push you to think above the status quo and become a leader in inclusive guest services.

We’re concerned about how guests will perceive this certification. How will they recognize its importance, and where will they see it?

This is a great question, and ultimately the best way to find out about how your particular guests will respond is through market research. If you are not sure of the value of this for your particular market, you may consider asking your guests on a check-out survey how important vegan options were as a factor in their choosing your hotel. From our end, we do everything we can to promote the certified hotels in our network to the vegan community including the ways shared in previous questions. Vegan Hospitality has been an established company within the vegan community for 5+ years, and our executive team has been involved with the hospitality sector and as vegan consultants in their communities for many years prior to the founding of Vegan Hospitality. Our team is in this for the long haul, not as a trend but to support the hospitality industry long term as more and more people turn to plant forward solutions for sustainability, health, and animal welfare reasons. 

Still have questions? We’d love to hear from you.