Byway Impact Report 2021
One year paving the way to making slow travel mainstream
Welcome to our first-ever Impact Report! We founded Byway with our environmental and social mission front and centre. Our vision is for a world in which flight-free holidays are the norm, and a vibrant sustainable travel ecosystem flourishes away off the beaten track. Every year we’ll share a report on the impact we’re having on this mission and what our plans are for the future.
One year on since founding in March 2020 as the first Covid lockdown hit the UK, we’ve been overwhelmed with the amount of support we’ve received. We’ve been received with such generous enthusiasm from customers, partners, members, investors and journalists alike, and the energy and momentum around slower travel this year has been astonishing. So we’d like to say a big thank you for making our first year fabulous and helping us further our mission of mainstreaming slow travel!
We’re excited to report on our year-one progress and to build on this in the years to come. We have three headline goals to help us deliver on our vision, each focussing on a different element of slow travel — climate, local economy and sustainable services. Here’s where we’re at at the end of year one:
1. Reduce the climate impact of leisure travel by making flight-free holidays mainstream
Our B Impact Assessment score increased from 88 to 109.5
Our first customers loved their holidays, left 100% five-star reviews, booked again and are referring friends. Enjoyment and referral is the number one thing that will help us mainstream slow travel, so we are thrilled at this!
We built unique trip planning technology that maximises enjoyment over speed, helping people travel flight-free because they want to, not because they ought to
We were featured in 75 press articles, reaching hundreds of thousands with our slow travel message, from the Guardian and Independent to the Times and Telegraph
We booked 75 holidays, which saved 75 trees worth of carbon!
2. Boost local economies and facilitate environmental recovery by drawing tourists away from hubs suffering over-tourism to the wonderful places in between
We got people off the beaten path: 91% of our places aren’t tourist hotspots and 72% of our holidays stayed away from hotspots most of the time (think cycling the Hebridean Isle of Mull rather than queuing for the summit of Snowdon)
We prioritised partnerships with locally owned and operated businesses, like Gumboots and Wellingtons in the North York Moors
3. Increase the proportion of tourist spend on sustainable products and services by prioritising partnerships with sustainable businesses
We declared a climate emergency alongside other travel and tourism businesses, and built partnerships with sustainable accommodation and experience provides in the destinations we operate in
We established an environment-first tech stack with renewably-powered data centres
We’re ready to increase our impact
Over the next year, we aim to increase our impact by increasing the reach of our messaging, booking more flight-free holidays, better understanding the sustainability of the providers we use, and better understanding the impact we are having. The top activities we’re undertaking to achieve this are:
Working to better understand what customers would have done had they not taken a Byway holiday, so we can improve the way we quantify our carbon impact in the future
Developing a Climate Emergency Plan to set out further intentions to reduce carbon emissions over the next decade
Reducing the total carbon emissions per customer arising from our operations and travel service
Further developing our tech to help us dynamically optimise towards lesser-known and less-booked locations based on real-time availability, and better account for seasonality
Fully define what ‘sustainable’ means so we can program this into our business and/or event recommendation and bookings systems
We’ve taken some significant first steps on our impact journey, and have mapped out some of the path ahead, towards becoming an ever better and brighter force for good in the world. Thank you for reading our Impact Report. We look forward to sharing more progress next year!
What you can do to help
Refer a friend!
Send us your slow travel content.
Become a member (if you’re not already).
Write about us.
Give us feedback (hello@byway.travel).
Follow us on social media and use #slowtravel
