SDG 8: Decent work and economic growth

In particular: 8.9: By 2030, formulate and implement policies to develop sustainable tourism that creates jobs and showcases local culture and products

SDG 11: Sustainable cities and communities

In particular: 11.4: Strengthen efforts to protect and preserve the world’s cultural and natural heritage 11.7: By 2030, ensure access for all, in particular women and children, older people and people with disabilities, to green spaces and safe public spaces 11.a: Foster positive economic, social and environmental linkages between urban, peri-urban and rural areas by strengthening development planning at national and regional levels

SDG 12: Sustainable consumption and production

In particular: 12.2: By 2030, achieve the sustainable management and rational use of natural resources 12.b: Develop and use tools to monitor impacts on sustainable development, to promote sustainable tourism that creates jobs and showcases local culture and products

SDG 13: Climate action

In particular: 13.3: Improve education, awareness and individual and institutional capacity regarding climate change adaptation, mitigation and the reduction of its impacts, as well as early warning systems

In particular: 15.1: By 2030, ensure the conservation, restoration and sustainable use of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems and their associated services, in particular forests, wetlands, mountains and arid lands, in accordance with obligations under international agreements 15.4: By 2030, ensure the conservation of mountain ecosystems, including their biodiversity, in order to better harness their essential benefits for sustainable development

The website no longer specifies particular operating system or device versions. It is compatible with the two latest major versions of the following browsers: Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, etc.); Safari (macOS, iOS and iPadOS); Firefox. This covers more than 95% of internet users.

Minimum system requirements

Minimum connection speed for comfortable access to and use of the service: 3G on mobile and 512 kbit/s on a fixed line The website adapts to screens from 320 px wide.

Eco-design declaration | Val d’Isère : Alps ski resort and winter sports

92%

compliance with the eco-design framework (RGESN) in our self-assessment

67 criteria

met out of 79 assessed (6 non-compliant, 6 not applicable)

100% WebP

of the site’s images are compressed in this lightweight format

3G

is enough to browse the site comfortably on mobile

The Val d’Isère Tourist Office is committed to an eco-design approach for its website www.valdisere.com, with a view to reducing its environmental impact.

As part of this, the communications department has appointed a designated representative who has been made aware of the challenges of responsible digital technology: Violette Staehle – Digital Communications Team Leader.

In order to carry out an initial assessment and identify areas for improvement, an audit was conducted in April 2023, revealing that the website was partially compliant with theGeneral Eco-design Reference Framework for Digital Services (RGESN) – Version 1 dated 28 November 2022.

What is the General Ecodesign Framework?

Recommended in thereport on software obsolescencethat the Government submitted to Parliament in June 2021, the General Ecodesign Framework for Digital Services is a commitment set out inthe government’s ‘Digital and Environment’ roadmappublished in February 2021. Led by the Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs (DINUM) and the Ministry for Ecological Transition, as well as ADEME and the Institute for Responsible Digital Technology (INR), this framework has two main objectives:

To combat the obsolescence of users’ equipment and network or server equipment
To reduce the consumption of IT and energy resources

Since the French law on reducing the environmental footprint of digital technology (REEN law), responsibility for defining the framework has been entrusted to Arcep and Arcom. A new version, RGESN 2024, was published in May 2024 in collaboration with ADEME: it contains 78 criteria across 9 themes, including a new theme dedicated to algorithms and artificial intelligence.

The 2024 version largely carries over the 2022 criteria, reorganised into new themes. The algorithms and artificial intelligence theme does not currently apply to our website.

Purpose of this website

This website aims to bring together all the information and resources that enable anyone to discover Val d’Isère as a tourist destination and plan their holiday. It also aims to promote the area’s appeal and its commitment to eco-responsible practices for sustainable tourism. Finally, this website aims to promote local businesses, and to help and support them in developing their tourism activities.

The identification of users of this website was the subject of UX research right from the initial design stage. Real needs and expectations are being analysed, and the Val d’Isère Tourist Office website is being updated to remove features or content that are rarely used, poorly understood and/or offer little value.

The service’s target users are primarily French and international tourists wishing to discover Val d’Isère and plan their stay, but also locals and holidaymakers already in the area looking for up-to-date information (slope openings in winter, activities to do, events to attend, places to visit, restaurants, etc.).

Sustainable Development Goals

By facilitating access to information and promoting tourism in its area, the Val d’Isère Tourist Office contributes to the following Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):

SDG 8: Decent work and economic growth
In particular:
- 8.9: By 2030, formulate and implement policies to develop sustainable tourism that creates jobs and showcases local culture and products
SDG 11: Sustainable cities and communities
In particular:
- 11.4: Strengthen efforts to protect and preserve the world’s cultural and natural heritage
- 11.7: By 2030, ensure access for all, in particular women and children, older people and people with disabilities, to green spaces and safe public spaces
- 11.a: Foster positive economic, social and environmental linkages between urban, peri-urban and rural areas by strengthening development planning at national and regional levels
SDG 12: Sustainable consumption and production
In particular:
- 12.2: By 2030, achieve the sustainable management and rational use of natural resources
- 12.b: Develop and use tools to monitor impacts on sustainable development, to promote sustainable tourism that creates jobs and showcases local culture and products
SDG 13: Climate action
In particular:
- 13.3: Improve education, awareness and individual and institutional capacity regarding climate change adaptation, mitigation and the reduction of its impacts, as well as early warning systems
SDG 15: Life on Land
In particular:
- 15.1: By 2030, ensure the conservation, restoration and sustainable use of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems and their associated services, in particular forests, wetlands, mountains and arid lands, in accordance with obligations under international agreements
- 15.4: By 2030, ensure the conservation of mountain ecosystems, including their biodiversity, in order to better harness their essential benefits for sustainable development

Strategy implemented and objectives regarding the reduction or mitigation of environmental impacts

The main challenge is to ensure that this website works on the oldest possible devices and under a variety of connectivity conditions:

Work on the user experience (UX) by offering different ways to access content: via ‘Our suggestions’ or via ‘What you’re looking for’ (by theme)
Navigation that is as intuitive as possible to minimise the time spent finding information
All content is accessible on mobile devices as a minimum. The website adapts to all screen sizes
Maximum compression of images and videos
Provision of a text alternative for videos
Manual removal of obsolete content: news, calendar entries, etc.

Given the specific nature of tourist destination websites, which must be at least somewhat appealing and immersive to inspire interest, it is difficult, if not impossible, for the Val d’Isère Tourist Office to restrict itself to a maximum number of server requests and a maximum resource load per screen that is within reasonable limits.

However, every effort has been made, in collaboration with the web agency that developed the website www.valdisere.com, to find the best balance between appeal, performance and environmental impact.

RGESN Assessment

The assessment carried out in April 2023 covered the following sample:

Visit the homepage
View an ‘envy’ page
View the list of hotels
View a hotel’s page
View the ‘Live Info’ page

The tools used to assess certain technical indicators are the ‘Network’ inspector in the browser’s developer tools, the Green IT Analysis extension, Yellow Lab Tools and the Eco Index tool.

Compliance

Using NumEcoDiag, the self-assessment shows a 92 per cent compliance rate with the RGESN (General Eco-design Framework):

67 criteria compliant
6 criteria non-compliant
6 criteria not applicable

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Compatible devices

The Val d’Isère Tourist Office uses the most standardised mechanisms possible. All desktop and mobile browsers must be supported. Consequently, the Val d’Isère Tourist Office website is compatible with any device capable of running a compatible web browser.

Compatible browsers
The website no longer specifies particular operating system or device versions. It is compatible with the two latest major versions of the following browsers:
- Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, etc.);
- Safari (macOS, iOS and iPadOS);
- Firefox.
This covers more than 95% of internet users.
Minimum system requirements
- Minimum connection speed for comfortable access to and use of the service: 3G on mobile and 512 kbit/s on a fixed line
- The website adapts to screens from 320 px wide.

Improvements made since the 2023 audit

Working with the web agency Raccourci, several technical optimisations have been made to make the site lighter:

All images on the site are now compressed in WebP format, which is lighter than JPEG, including thumbnails from our tourist information database (Apidae)
The site’s scripts (JavaScript files) are now centralised on the Cloudflare content delivery network (CDN)
The new version of the tourist listings (accommodation, restaurants, activities, etc.) has allowed us to remove old JavaScript libraries: less code to download on each visit
A new, lighter “Content list” block is now available and will gradually be used across our pages.

Identified improvements

Where do we stand in 2026?

Use on low-bandwidth connections (criterion 4.1): the website is compatible with low-bandwidth connections.
Requests during user input (criterion 4.11): done. The search engine waits for 3 characters and a short delay before querying the server.
Display on all screens (criterion 1.6): some overlapping may still occur on certain tablet sizes, in very rare cases.
Number of domains called (criterion 6.11): in progress. Scripts are centralised on Cloudflare, and Cloudflare caching is planned.
Impact of third-party components and services (criteria 2.4 and 2.5): in progress. We are asking our service providers about their environmental impact.
Activation of third-party services and user control over content (criteria 4.5 and 4.19): not yet possible.
Document retention periods (criteria 7.3 and 7.4): in progress. An inventory of the website’s files (PDFs, etc.) is planned so that they can be cleared out regularly; files that are removed are deleted, not archived.

Agency shortcut Our agency’s commitments

Since 2018,Raccourci Agency has been strongly committed to creating a more sustainable future for everyone.

“We believe that the digital world can and must play an important role in the fight to protect the environment. That is why we have made concrete commitments to eco-design and sustainability. In this document, we outline the actions we are taking to minimise our environmental impact and the measures we are implementing to ensure the longevity of our digital solutions.”