Drs. Albert Salman is a Dutch sustainable tourism expert, with an academic background in coastal ecology and environmental science. After leading the Dutch Society for Dune Conservation, he became founding director of the European Coastal Union (EUCC, 1989) where he established the QualityCoast Awards program (2007) and the GSTR database, which provided the basis for the Awards & Certification Program as part of the Green Destinations initiative (2014).

As Green Destinations founder, Albert initiated the Sustainable Destinations Top 100 (2014), the Global Leaders initiative (2018), and in 2020 the Good Travel Guide (a travel website only featuring independently checked sustainable travel offer) and the Good Travel Program, offering a variety of tools to assess, support, certify and promote the sustainability of businesses in the tourism sector. The program offers special solutions for micro-businesses and SMEs as well as fully GSTC-Aligned business certification, with white label options to support destination branding.