Difficult subjects inspire difficult questions, so when a panel of experts on sustainable travel took up the matter of what customers can do to help the industry achieve its climate goals, they paused as if summer’s heat waves had already bested the air conditioning at Phocuswright Europe.
The problem with that expectation — put best by Hazel McGuire, the general manager for the United Kingdom and Ireland at Intrepid Travel — is that customers don’t come to travel companies because they want a sustainable experience.
“They’re coming because they want a good holiday,” she told the audience of travel professionals in the concluding Center Stage presentation at last month’s three-day conference in Barcelona.
Adhering to a sustainable lifestyle may be easier at home, where the routines are better understood, added Choni Fernández, the customer and sustainability director at PortAventura World.
“Customers, they need tangible things, you know, in sustainability. It’s quite easy to explain and to talk about elimination of plastic, food waste – that is easy,” she said. “When you arrive to reduction of emissions, science-based target initiatives, net zero – this is much more complex.”
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The session had begun with a keynote speech from Bernadett Papp, a senior researcher with the European Tourism Futures Institute, who summarized her organization’s work on a report published this year by the Travel Foundation that examined how the travel industry could reach United Nations’ goals of halving global emissions by 2030 and achieving net zero by 2050.
Their conclusion: The only way to allow travel to continue growing while meeting the climate targets from the 2015 Paris Climate Accords was capping airport capacities at 2019 levels until aviation can fully decarbonize.
“We need to join forces. We need to collaborate,” she urged the audience. “Hopefully then, the goal of net zero by 2050 will be in reach, and we as a sector can do our part.”
With that in mind, the responsibility for sustainable travel must fall mainly on the companies providing it, McGuire said.
“It needs to be something that everybody is doing,” she said. “We need to look at the supply chain and look at how we can provide customers with sustainable options.”
Travelers rarely have all the information they need to make informed decisions at every step of a journey, Papp said. Even when they do, it may be asking too much to expect them to take those steps.
“Let’s be honest,” she said. “It’s quite hard to always make the right choice.”
Her institute’s research shows most travelers are willing to do things like shop or dine at locally-owned businesses, though these measures won’t balance out the emissions of a transatlantic flight.
“They’re willing to choose alternatives. However, the behavioral categories where they are willing to make changes are the categories with the least impact from an environmental perspective,” Papp said. “Real sacrifices, like choosing alternative destinations or traveling closer to home or traveling by train, which can take a little bit longer – those are the changes that they’re not willing to make yet.”
That doesn’t mean there isn’t more travelers can do, McGuire said.
“They can travel slower. They can take public transport. They can choose to spend their money with local companies and put money back into the communities where they are traveling,” she said. “But to be perfectly honest in terms of the scale of the change we need, we need this to be more on the supply side than the demand side. If we wait for customer behavior to be where it needs to be, we won’t get there.”
Watch their full discussion in the video below.
Crisis? What Crisis? Ramping up Sustainability in Tourism – Phocuswright Europe 2023