The travel industry was one of the first to recognise the benefits of carbon offsetting. Today travel organisations of all sizes give their customers the opportunity to offset the emissions from their travel. At the 2007 ABTA convention Jonathan Porritt, Founder Director of Forum for the Future, stated that offsetting flights will become a ‘non-negotiable imperative’ for leisure and business travel in the future.

Offering ClimateCare to your travel customers at point of sale

• Included: This sends out the strongest environmental message demonstrating carbon responsibility. The best practice approach in the industry is to include the cost of ClimateCare in the price of the trip.

• Opt-out/opt-in: Offer your customer the option to pay or include the cost of ClimateCare, but allow them to opt-out if they choose.

When offering ClimateCare as an option, it is vital that you commit resource to marketing the scheme to your customers and training your staff in related issues, otherwise uptake may prove disappointing. We can provide a training programme to help you with this.

Calculating the CO₂ emissions

• Banding system: we will provide you with a banding system to help you work out an appropriate CO₂ offset amount and price for your customer, related to the distance flown.

• Integrate the calculation into your system: For larger travel companies, we can provide a simple calculation or database query function to enable you to calculate the CO₂ emissions and offset price at point of sale, based upon distance flown or IATA airport codes. Please be aware this will require some in-house development on your system, and may only be done under an offsetting contract of guaranteed tonnage greater than 3,000t.

Travel case studies

Naturally Morocco offer their customers the option to offset their return flights to Morocco, and agree to offset those customers’ flights who choose not to. This gives exceptionally high uptake rates from customers of as much as 60%.

Wildlife Worldwide offer their offsets as an opt-in and uptake has been relatively high at about 42% overall since 2006. This high uptake is helped by incorporating information about the offset in their brochure, at point of sale and on deposit letters once the sale has been made. Mel Kinder, Operations Assistant, attended the ClimateCare quarterly training session and ‘found the whole afternoon extremely valuable’.

Original Travel offer offsetting at point of sale on an opt-out basis. Uptake has been extremely high with customers rarely opting not to offset the emissions from their flight. The uptake is higher than 99%

Newmarket Holidays sells its ‘Natural World’ holidays with a full flight offset included in the price and offers its clients the option to create a positive offset by contributing an additional payment.

For more information contact business@climatecare.org or call +44 (1865) 591000.