The Sustainability Edge marks its 25th episode exploring sustainable tourism in Africa.

The Sustainability Edge: Your Tourism Podcast has just released its 25th episode. Hosted by ATTA® member Samantha Smits, the show looks at how sustainability protects a tourism business's profit, reputation, and yes, sanity.

A few problems keep coming up across the episodes. Being fully booked feels like success, but it often hides operational chaos that only shows up once things get busy. Buying supplies, doing maintenance, and handing information between shifts all tend to work fine in low season, then fall apart under pressure. Small breakdowns like these quietly eat into profit all season long.

"Everything breaks at the same time, and it all happens with the same booking," said Samantha in one of the latest episodes.

The show has also followed the EU's new green transition rules. From 27 September 2026, EU businesses that make sustainability claims without evidence can be fined, and this now reaches their whole supply chain. For African tourism businesses working with EU-based agents (and more similar directives are coming up from other regions too), that shifts risk downstream: if an agent makes a sustainability claim the supplier behind it can't back up with evidence, the supplier can be the reason that the agent gets fined, which then understandably becomes a business partner risk.

One theme comes up again and again as a solution: sustainability certification, such as Travelife for Tour Operators, Fair Trade Tourism, or Green Key, gives a business a ready-made framework for building that evidence for their (agent's) sustainability claims, rather than assembling it through self-reporting.