The Center for Responsible Travel (CREST) is undertaking a two-year project to analyze and help to strengthen small-scale, boutique hotel and household-based tourism businesses in Cuba and to compare their economic, social, and environmental impacts to large-scale cruise tourism. This project involves research studies and field work together with universities in Pinar del Rio and Holguin provinces as well as in Havana. The project is directed by CREST executive director Martha Honey and coordinated in Havana by Rafael Betancourt, who is working with teams of academic in the two provinces and in Havana. The activities include supporting sustainable tourism workshops in the respective Congresses that both universities will be holding in spring and summer 2019 and organizing learning exchanges/study tours for academics from both universities.

A delegation of eight professors from Pinar del Rio will visit Costa Rica in November; then a team of Holguin professors will take a study tour in early 2019, likely to either Costa Rica or Belize. At both universities and in Havana, studies are underway to assess the impacts of small-scale tourism including boutique hotels, casas particulares (B&Bs) and paladares (home restaurants), which have been used by European, Canadian, and U.S. travellers on people to people tours to Cuba. This type of tourism was very negatively hurt by the Trump administration’s listing of Cuba with a level 3 travel advisory, the downsizing of the U.S. and Cuban embassies, and other measures beginning in 2017. However, the State Department decision in August 2018 to move Cuba to a level 2 is expected to help reverse this trend, with U.S. people to people travel to Cuba increasing over the coming months. CREST's partners in Cuba are studying these trends, and the organization is also planning to undertake a study that documents the history and impact of U.S. travel policies on small scale, people to people tourism to Cuba.