Startup Stage: FlyGRN combines flight booking with automatic carbon offsetting

FlyGRN

FlyGRN uses a portion of the commission it receives for flight bookings to support carbon offsetting projects, such as a solar panel initiative in India that displaces fossil fuels. Travelers receive a CO2 certificate in the mail to verify the transaction.

FlyGRN also pays to plant a tree in India for every €100 travelers spend booking hotels and car rentals via its partners.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

As FlyGRN, our main purpose is to accelerate emission reductions in the travel and aviation industry. Our business aspect is a smart business model in which we combine a flight search engine and a CO2 offsetting service in one site. With this model, we aim to decrease CO2 emissions from flying, create awareness by displaying carbon metrics while searching flights and use substitution for other travel alternatives if those are available.

To be able to accomplish emission reductions in aviation, it’s necessary to have correct numbers and research facts in place. That’s something where we’ve put lots of emphasis on and tried to implement in our carbon calculator, the carbon reduction programs we chose and the sustainable alternative travel forms we recommend. IT‐wise, FlyGRN uses the latest developer technologies, making searching as fast and user‐friendly as possible.

What inspired you to create this company?

FlyGRN is created due to frustration about a lack of transparency of the current CO2 offsetting services. When offsetting flights, it is often unclear what exactly happens with the CO2 offsetting and where the money goes. FlyGRN attaches great value to providing as many details as possible on the CO2 certificates. If you book a flight through the search engine, you will receive an online CO2 certificate with a personalized certificate number. This certificate contains transparent information, such as which offsetting projects are supported and where the money ends up.

Currently, less than 1% of all air travelers offsets the CO2 emissions of their flight. We just wanted to create a flight search engine that automatically offsets the visitor’s flight CO2 emissions out of part of the margin it receives from selling flight tickets. Thereby, part of the CO2 offsetting happens automatically, there’s no manual steps involved. Herewith, we hope that more travelers will offset their flight.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

• Strength: It’s never been easier to offset the CO2 of your flight, since offsetting happens automatically when you search flight tickets through our website and book via our partners. We’re new to the travel world, so we can quickly adapt and innovate. We have a large experience in sustainability-related projects.
• Weakness: It’s also a con that we’re new to the travel world, since we have less experience in this field than others.
• Opportunity: There’s no flight search engine that gives away part of their margin to offset part of the flight emissions of their visitors. Air travel and sustainability is a hot topic, whereby air travelers are more and more seeking ways to reduce the impact of their flying and traveling behavior.
• Threat: While giving a way part of our margins, we’re probably making less profit then competitors.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

Air travel is expected to double within 20 years, and its contribution to greenhouse gases is thereby increasing. We’re trying to improve the number of travelers that offset the CO2 emissions of their flights, which is currently less than 1% of the travelers. When it’s known that there’s a flight metasearch engine that searches the best possible flight tickets and automatically offsets (part of) the CO2 emissions for free, then there’s no reason to bother about forgetting to manually offset your CO2.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

We’re starting to spread the word in the ecosector, working together with eco bloggers and influencers, newspapers that write about sustainability and we’re pushing a lot in online marketing. After becoming well known in the eco sector, our goal is to become mainstream in the global online travel market.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

There’s a growing number of online flight bookings, compared to regular travel agents. The travel and tourism business is a trillion‐dollar‐per‐year business. However, according to research from Booking.com, 32% of the travelers feel guilty about the impact their vacation has had on the environment.

If you book a flight through the search engine, you will receive an online CO2 certificate with a personalized certificate number.

FlyGRN

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Given such a large amount of travelers that feel guilty about their vacation, there seems need for a business model that tries to help travelers reduce the impact that their travel has. Except from automatically offsetting the flights of our visitors, we also give train alternatives for short distances (train travel can save up to 90% of CO2 emissions compared to air travel), and we give our visitors insight in the CO2 impact that their travelling has, making it easy for them to compare travel options on the amount of CO2 impact their travelling may have.

How and when will you make money?

I’d like to emphasize that we started out of idealistic principles. Making money is important to fund our costs, but making large profits ASAP is not our main goal. We prefer having impact over making large amounts of profit. We’re already making money, since there are already flight tickets sold (and offset) and there’s also customers manually offsetting their CO2.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team, and why do you have what it takes to succeed with this business?

Jelle Bekirovic, the owner has a master's degree in energy and sustainability. He’s an internet entrepreneur and has various online comparison websites in clothing, furniture and sustainability services. Both content creators have sustainability degrees as well, and the other (freelance) members of the team are mainly experienced in online marketing.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

That’s been to use the right communication strategy. Initially when people landed on our website, they thought that we’re either an ordinary ticket booking site or a CO2 offsetting site, not that we’re a combination of both.

We’re currently improving our homepage to more clearly communicate about this. This means we implemented lots of storytelling and also explainer videos will follow soon.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact ‐ so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

We’re doing exactly the same as other flight search engines, but we’re giving away part of our margin to reduce CO2 emissions in flying. We hope that’s enough for users to switch to us. The online flight ticket market is large enough, so creating impact in this industry will be even more important in the next coming years.

Emissions in travel not only occur in aviation, but also in, for example, the hotel and car rental industry. How are you dealing with this?

While traveling, it’s not only the flight’s emissions that contribute to the travel’s greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, it is our purpose to accelerate emissions reductions in travel, so not solely in aviation. We also built search engines for hotels and rental cars. For every €100 you spend on hotels and car rentals via our partners we plant one tree in India, thereby preventing deforestation. We thoroughly describe our full purpose and mission on our mission page.