Marketers in travel and tourism are endlessly innovative in coming up with new words to convey the difference and to assert the superiority of the product they are selling. I wrote here a couple of weeks ago about commercial research funded by Tearfund, which revealed that for UK tourists, cost, weather, and accommodation facilities were most important in determining the choice of holidays.
This is surely not surprising; consumers want to purchase a product or set of products which “do the job.” Then came socioeconomic and environmental issues and the company’s ethical policies. At the bottom of the list came “used the company before.” Tour operators and destinations are coy about repeat visitor numbers, although most recognise that repeats and referrals are the ‘cheapest’ clients to recruit. I suspect that repeats and referrals are a significant part of their business for some operators and destinations but not for the sector as a whole.
Discussing the Tearfund research in seminars at Greenwich University, JustinS Francis made the obvious but profound point that while he could not taste the difference between fairly traded coffee and its lesser alternative, you should be able to experience the difference on a Responsible Holiday. Responsible Travel was conceived and has prospered. If you want to learn how to communicate sustainability, take a look at the trips on the responsibletravel.com. Bold claims “Our holidays are more enjoyable because they do good,” and customer reviews add credibility and texture.
Way back in 2002 in the RT Cape Town Declaration on Responsible Tourism in Destinations, we recognised that Responsible Tourism needed to provide “more enjoyable experiences for tourists through more meaningful connections with local people, and a greater understanding of local cultural, social and environmental issues” The importance of meaningful connections for tourists was reasserted in the 2022 Responsible Tourism Charter.
Meaningful travel for the consumer is an important dimension of Responsible Tourism, but it is only part. An important part, but as the Declaration and the Charter make clear, there is much more to it. The destination belongs to the host community; Responsible Tourism must offer “culturally sensitive experiences engendering respect between tourists and hosts, and building local pride and confidence as well as being inclusive and minimising negative social, economic and environmental impacts and maximising the positive impacts. The tourists need to behave as guests in someone else’s home.
Details of the new ne EU Green Claims Directive are far from settled, but for sure, greenwashing will be substantially reduced and possibly eliminated by the legal requirement that green claims must be verified. Not before time, our sector is awash with unsubstantiated claims, undermining the credibility of those who are operating with more responsibility and achieving a degree of sustainability.
There are reports in the regional press that “Lapland tourism marketing [is] under scrutiny as EU tightens greenwashing rules” Tero Heinonen from the Finnish Environment Institute has pointed out that in “many tourism advertisements, untouched nature is often framed as an environmental achievement of the tourism operator. “In reality, this has nothing to do with the environmental impact of the operator, whether the destination is in the middle of nature or next to a factory,”
The Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority (FCCA) has called out Finnair for giving a misleading impression about the positive environmental impacts of the aviation fuel the airline uses. We can expect increasing action on greenwashing by regulatory authorities across Europe and around the world.
And not before time, greenwashing misleads consumers, spreads confusion and undermines the credibility of all of us: the good, the bad and the ugly.
Certification communicates little to travellers and holidaymakers; much thought needs to be given to how we communicate credibly the good our sector does and how we avoid certificated greenwashing.
