The Power of Transparency in Sustainable Tourism

Travellers are increasingly seeking adventure and exploration while minimising their environmental impact. In episode 3 of our "Tour Tech: Your 5 Weekly Takeaways to Tourism Success" podcast series, part of the EU-funded?Tourbit project , we learn about how the environmental footprint of tourism can be calculated and communicated to visitors. This article explores how two innovative companies,?DiscoveRent ?and?Greentripper , are leveraging digitalisation to make sustainable travel easier and more transparent.

Adventure with a Conscience

DiscoveRent is a digital platform curating unique outdoor adventures across Europe, focused on sustainable travel experiences that prioritise low-impact practices and eco-friendly choices. Maxime Mertens, Co-Founder of DiscoveRent, highlights that sustainable travel is ingrained in the company's DNA.?Every trip that DiscoveRent creates is eco-designed to minimise the carbon footprint of transport, accommodation and food.

DiscoveRent not only focuses on minimising carbon footprints, but also social sustainability. Maxime explains the importance of local partners, with the company ensuring that their guides share the same values. With this approach, guides help curate experiences by sharing their knowledge of local eco lodges owned by families, further supporting the local economy.

Unveiling the Carbon Footprint

Anne Robertz, Director of Greentripper, sheds light on the environmental impact of travel and how the company helps travellers and businesses to compare and reduce their carbon footprint. Greentripper's user-friendly carbon footprint calculator estimates the emission factor using its database, following internationally recognised standards. The company also does independent audits to obtain the necessary data when existing emission factors are unavailable. ?

Greentripper's API streamlines the integration of carbon footprint calculations with external platforms, saving DiscoveRent valuable time and resources. This allows travel professionals like DiscoveRent to showcase their commitment to sustainability by providing a detailed breakdown of each trip's carbon footprint.

Transparency Through Technology

The collaboration between DiscoveRent and Greentripper empowers travellers with knowledge about their impact on the planet. When browsing expeditions on the DiscoveRent website, users can view a clear breakdown of the carbon footprint for each trip. This breakdown considers factors like transportation, accommodation and other logistics, allowing travellers to make informed choices that align with their environmental values.

The partnership also enables visitors to compare the impact associated with different modes of transport, encouraging visitors to travel more sustainably. For example, a seven day trip to Sweden emits roughly 470 kilos of CO2 when flying from Brussels or Paris, while taking the train only contributes 90 kilos of CO2. This data-led approach makes tourists more conscious of the carbon emissions of their holiday and provides a persuasive and compelling argument to engage in low-impact travel and offset the unavoidable emissions through contributions to local projects.

Being a digital initiative, the efficiency of the pilot project will be easily monitored by tracking the number of website users that visit the carbon footprint breakdown web pages. This will bring extensive insights into the sensitivity of travellers to responsible travel and help evaluate the success of low-impact travel experiences, highlighting that experiences are more important than destinations. ?

Key Takeaways for SMEs

Both DiscoveRent and Greentripper believe that responsible travel is the future. Travellers are increasingly seeking transparency and a way to minimise their environmental impact while exploring the world. By integrating carbon footprint information into the travel planning process, DiscoveRent and Greentripper empower travellers to make a positive difference.

Digitalisation can be an enabler of sustainability, acting as a tool that helps tourism businesses rethink their relationship with the environment and local communities. Crucial to this is that businesses place sustainable values at the core of their businesses, prioritising experiences over destinations. By collaborating with local providers, companies have more control over their supply chain and can encourage the uptake of sustainable operations by these businesses, while benefiting from local knowledge to drive decision-making.

Reflecting visitors increasing desires to travel sustainably, digital platforms such as Greentripper use research and a data-led approach to measure visitor behaviour and the environmental impact of travel, following internationally recognised standards. This helps businesses to transparently share information with their customers, persuading them to make conscious decisions. This is especially important in the EU, where the recently announced Green Claims Directive has the ambition of ensuring robust and reliable claims are made, supported by evidence.

Taking a long-term view, tourism businesses should see strong potential in changing their business models towards one that is more responsible. With API integrations, it's never been easier to incorporate intuitive and user-friendly tools that add significant value for customers. This makes it more efficient for visitors to truly understand the impact of their trip, with all information in one location. Customers can then also mitigate and offset their emissions, supporting local environmental projects. Seamless digital processes therefore add value for businesses, enabling them to have better relationships with customers without much added work, enabling companies to still focus on the core aspects of their business.

Here are the five key takeaways:

1. Today's travellers are increasingly seeking responsible and low-impact travel options, making it essential that tourism businesses adapt to these desires in their product offerings.
2. Think about the role of technology. Embedding tools like carbon footprint calculators are just one small step that can empower visitors to make a conscious decision about what they book.
3. Internationally recognised standards, such as ISOs, are a really important part of the picture to create alignment within the industry and provide clear and accessible information on the impact of visitor decisions.
4. Empowering travellers to compare and choose sustainable travel options will also help the tourism industry significantly reduce impact.
5. A strong ethics-based supply chain where sustainability data sits right at the heart of business propositions is key to finding a competitive edge in today's tourism landscape.

The podcast is part of the Tourbit project, co-funded by the EU's COSME programme, with the support of the Agència Catalana de Turisme / Catalan Tourist Board , Cambra de Barcelona , Paris&Co , Arctur , hub.brussels , Iceland Tourism Cluster , Lapland University of Applied Sciences and NEST Centro de Inova??o do Turismo .