
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.
Website
https://flygrn.com/
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
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.
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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.
PhocusWire Startup Stage
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