Luxury travel with a conscience, holiday rentals that help communities – these start-ups make your trips more sustainable
- The hotel industry accounts for one per cent of global carbon emissions, so booking sustainable accommodation helps lower your carbon footprint
- Smarter and Fairbnb are short-stay specialists: one offsets guests’ carbon footprints and eliminates room waste, the other donates to local community projects
It’s a conundrum of our time. After nearly two years in lockdown, many of us are desperate for a change of scenery, some choosing to go on holiday abroad despite the extra financial burden of PCR tests for Covid-19 and weeks confined in hotel quarantine on return.
At the same time, the need to reduce our carbon footprint has never been more acute.
Scientists tell us we have as little as a decade to halve global carbon emissions. It’s a window of opportunity that, with news this summer dominated by wildfires and floods, is closing ever more rapidly.
The onus to get to net-zero emissions as fast as possible is on governments and multinational companies that have the power to effect significant change, of course, but that doesn’t mean every personal decision doesn’t have an effect.
The travel and hospitality pause over the past year gives us the perfect opportunity to reset how we operate
Aviation is responsible for as much as 3.5 per cent of the warming impact caused by humans, according to the CarbonBrief website, so choosing not to fly in the first place is the simplest road to a low-carbon travel footprint. But there are other areas in which ethical decisions can be made.