Travel Insights: Sustainability
Travel & Tourism
Raise your hand if you’re feeling a little bit sustainability’d out. Like us, you’re probably hearing it everywhere, from your local dry cleaner no longer using plastic bags to your favorite restaurant sourcing their food locally to the almost-daily announcements from big brands proclaiming their commitment to being green by like 2075 when the fished-out and overly-polluted oceans will likely have climbed up our coastlines by another couple of inches. Hey good for you, big brands. Well done.
Apologies, I digress. Fact is, the sound of sustainability surrounds us, and can be, at times, somewhat overwhelming.
But keep that hand raised if you know that sustainability (and its sister issue climate change) are significant problems facing the planet and – while on a slightly less existential but maybe more acute and personal level to some of the readers of this blog – are also dramatically impacting the travel industry.
Congratulations, hand raisers. Acknowledging the problem is the first step toward finding the solution.
Look, we don’t pretend to have all the answers. But what we do have is an incredible Insights team that can rock a problem, and come up with a bunch of different ways to pull it apart, to look at it upside down and sideways, and to break it up into bite-size pieces that feel eminently more, well, bite-able. Solve-able. Tackle-able.
And that’s what the team did with this month’s edition of Travel Insights. They tackled and broke down the massive challenge of Sustainability into 5 themes that point to the importance of travel brands participating in – and in some cases even leading – the fight to help make their businesses, and the industry overall, more sustainable. The themes are:
- Sustainability as an industry imperative
- Sustainability as a lifestyle
- Sustainable destinations as a goal for development
- Sustainability as a value of residents
- Sustainability as a measure for quality travelers
We know that’s a lot of sustainability. Fact is, with the number of people and brands and governments around the world working on sustainability, the issue isn’t going away anytime soon. So as good as it might feel to cover your ears the next time someone uses “the S word,” instead we hope you’ll take a few moments to download and review this brief document, and perhaps put some of its principles and examples to work in your own organization.
Feel free to let us know if you want to chat further about anything in there.
P.S. You can put your hand down now.
This content series is created as a collaborative effort amongst BVK members Matt Stiker, Abby Rennicke, and Aliesha Oldenburg.
