admin Environmental issues seem increasingly at the forefront of many consumers’ minds. A majority of travellers worldwide recently said sustainability was important to them.
“Sustainable travel is no longer the ambition of the few but of the many,” said Booking.com in its 2022 Sustainable Travel Report.
Yet despite the increasing demand for sustainable travel, companies throughout the industry have struggled to provide greener travel options for consumers. Roughly 31 percent of respondents in the aforementioned survey said they didn’t know sustainable accommodations existed, and 29 percent admitted they knew how to find them.
And travel companies’ large-scale push to promote their loyalty programs is further making greener travel more difficult. Loyalty programs, incredibly lucrative for airlines and hotels, have been described as frequency programs, which require more stays or more miles flown to achieve certain status levels. Luxury hotel brands, in particular, are generally less environmentally-friendly than midscale and economy brands since they usually have larger rooms and more amenities, which result in higher emissions.
The urgency to make travel more sustainable is only heightened because of the industry’s enormous carbon footprint. Tourism contributed roughly 11 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, by one estimate. And transport-related emissions from international tourism are projected to grow 25 percent by 2030, predicted a 2019 report from the United Nations World Tourism Organization.
The International Tourism Partnership found that hotels need to reduce their carbon emissions per room by 66 percent by 2030 and 90 percent by 2050 compared to 2010 levels to comply with the Paris Agreement on climate change. A 2021 report examining the environmental performance of six major hotel companies revealed — and Accor notched the lowest average emissions per room of them. Skift Research also found that companies with higher-end portfolios tend to have higher emissions per room.
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