‘Small is beautiful!’ so said the leading economist Schumacher (1979) and we are tempted to use his slogan to announce what we believe to be good news, namely that awareness of environmental responsibility in the small business sector seems to be alive and well. When the hotel ‘Les Orangeries’ (hotel-lesorangeries.com), in the region of Vienne, became the first hotel in the whole of France to go green and get its Ecolabel, we realised that the whole concept of Eco-labelling in tourism was actually beginning to take off, and since then an increasing number of projects and strategies has got underway. This paper intends, on the one hand, to discuss the main elements and milestones of an industry finally taking responsibility for itself; and on the other, to describe and follow the steps taken by a small provincial hotel business to gain Ecolabel status.