Users get access to special rates-typically 10% to 15% off the hotel’s best available rate-when they give $10 to a local charity, Blotter says. Kind Traveler, launched in 2016, adds another twist to the sustainable hotel hunt: In addition to highlighting greener accommodations, the company encourages travelers to positively impact the destinations they visit. That doesn’t leave much time to learn about a destination’s social and environmental problems or engage with local communities. “Some people just want to go to as many places as they can as fast as they can and take pictures and say ‘I’ve been to x, y and z,’ ” Miller says. Yes, many retirees have worked long and hard to cross every destination off their bucket list-but those who want to travel sustainably should avoid a check-the-box approach to destinations. Here are four key steps that can help travelers tread more lightly. “It’s more about how you can minimize the impact.”
“Sustainable is a nice name for it, but I’m not sure any of it is truly sustainable,” says Ged Caddick, president and chief executive officer of Terra Incognita Ecotours. Some in the industry are skeptical that sustainable travel can completely avoid such consequences. All that coming and going can lead to environmental damage, overcrowding and overdevelopment. Due in part to a strong economy and cheap air travel, there were 1.4 billion international tourist arrivals worldwide in 2018, up 6% from a year earlier, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization.
The focus on sustainability comes amid growing concern about overtourism. “Hotels, tourist boards, airlines, everyone is scrambling to figure out what sustainable travel looks like for them.”
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“There’s a lot of buzz around travelers wanting to travel sustainably and consciously, but they don’t know how to do it,” says Jessica Blotter, chief executive officer and co-founder of socially conscious hotel booking platform Kind Traveler. As more travel industry players seek to style themselves as “sustainable,” it can be tough for consumers to separate the marketing fluff from the serious sustainability initiatives. Sustainable travelers may opt to travel by train rather than plane, book hotels that avoid single-use plastics, and select tour operators that engage with local conservation groups. The result: strong consumer demand for “sustainable” travel, which aims to not only protect the planet but also celebrate the culture of each destination and support the local economy, says Jessica Hall Upchurch, sustainability ambassador for travel-agency network Virtuoso. Boomers are more likely than Gen X, Millennials or Gen Z to choose environmentally friendly accommodations and modes of transport when booking trips, the survey found.Īcross all generations, but particularly among boomers, there’s “a growing awareness about the urgency and impact of climate change, loss of biodiversity, and just in general, unsustainable practices,” says Gregory Miller, executive director of the Center for Responsible Travel. In fact, when it comes to choosing sustainable travel options, baby boomers are leading the way, according to a recent survey by.
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