Hopper will fund the planting of six million trees this year - at a cost of $1 million - thanks to its decision to offset the emissions impact
of all flights and hotels purchased in its app.
The new Hopper Trees initiative covers all bookings made as
of January 1, 2020.
For each purchase, Hopper will make a donation to Eden
Reforestation Projects to fund the planting of four trees per flight sold and
two trees per hotel room sold.
“In a perfect world we’d all stop flying, because it’s
contributing about 3% of global emissions. But in reality, what’s happening is
air travel is forecasted for a little more than 4% growth,” says Hopper
co-founder and CEO Fred Lalonde.
“As we got bigger and more successful ... we were feeling uneasy
about what we were doing. And then we realized there was a very simple solution: take some of the money we make and immediately put it to work to offset the
carbon that’s already there. It was a very easy decision. We didn’t do a risk/reward
on this; we didn’t do an ROI on it; we just said we can’t continue to talk
about our successful business if we don’t do this.”
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Lalonde says his team spent about six months doing research on
carbon offsetting, designing the plan for Hopper Trees and selecting a
reforestation partner.
“Carbon sequestration through trees is a proven way to get
carbon out of the atmosphere – it’s not a new technology like electric flight
that has to be invented. The tree already knows what to do, but you have to plant
it in the right place and it has to survive,” he says.
“Eden operates in specific areas like Madagascar, Indonesia,
Kenya, Mozambique and have been doing it since 2005, and they have proven they
can regrow the forest there.”
To simplify the implementation, Lalonde says they determined
that planting four trees per flight booked - regardless of flight distance - will
offset, on aggregate, the emissions from all airfare Hopper sells. Now he hopes
other travel CEOs will follow his lead.
“Usually when we build a feature we are super happy to be the
only ones to have it, and we kind of flaunt it in the face of our competitors,
how innovative we are,” he says.
“In this case I’d like to issue a challenge to the CEOs of
Expedia, Booking.com, Ctrip, even Google. They should be doing exactly the same
thing.
"If we are able to do it at our scale - and we are a company that does not
turn a profit yet - they are able to have an impact, each of them, 100 times
our scale. They can call me, and we’ll tell them what to do because we’ve already
done all the hard work of figuring out how to do this.”
Hopper's approach - as a booking app rather than as an airline, for example - comes at a time when the effectiveness of carbon offsetting is coming into question from some industry leaders, such as Responsible Travel CEO Justin
Francis, who says carbon offset efforts take too long to create meaningful change
to the environment and “are
a fig leaf, often used to justify more carbon pollution.”
Similarly, Niklas Hagelberg, coordinator of the UN Environment’s
subprogram on climate change, says, “The offset should be considered the last
mile of getting closer to carbon neutrality.”
As the aviation sector, in particular, assesses how it gets there, Hopper believes its efforts are the start of a positive move from its - and ideally other travel intermediaries' - end toward a sustainable industry.