How our carbon labelling works

Around 8% of all the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from tourism and at least 2.5% of global carbon emissions can be attributed directly to flying. The industry needs to change in order to preserve our planet, whilst still being able to enjoy exploring it  - a pressure point that has caused a huge amount of greenwashing in this space. The best way to ensure authentic change is to be transparent, and this is why we’re launching our newest feature: carbon labelling for every trip!

For more insights into our trips and tech, slow travel inspiration and insider tips, subscribe to our newsletter.

CO2 per trip

Find out how much CO2 your Byway holiday will cost, and how that compares to going by by plane or car.

How do we calculate this?

Transport

1. Each leg (a journey between A and B) in our database is tagged with its transport provider

2. We have researched how much CO2 is produced per person per kilometre for each of these providers. (For providers that don’t report on this, we take the national average for that type of transport, e.g. regional/national trains, buses or ferries).

3. We then calculate the distance in km between the two coordinates of the leg

4. For each leg, we then multiply: distance x CO2 per passenger km x amount of passengers

Accommodation

We source this data using the Greenhouse gas reporting data set from the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA), which reports the average carbon footprint of a hotel stay for different countries.

We take the CO2 data for a night’s stay in the relevant country, and multiply it by the amount of rooms and nights.

engin akyurt

Flight and car comparison

To compare the emissions of a Byway trip versus going by plane or car, we add the accommodation carbon footprint to the equivalent emissions for other transport methods, using data from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. 

• For cars: we take the equivalent of a petrol car and assume there is only one car per journey.

• For flights: We can’t perfectly compare a Byway trip to a similar trip by plane, as our trips are multi-stop and many people might not choose to fly between all of these stops. Instead, we calculate the distance to the furthest city in the journey and assume the customer would fly there and back again. We then multiply this by the CO2 for each type of flight.

• Domestic flights are <1000km

• Short-haul flights are between 1000-2000km

• Long-haul flights are 2000-5000km

How we are improving this feature for the future

Our methodology makes some assumptions and is not 100% accurate. Here are some of the areas that we are working to improve on:

• We currently don’t have CO2 data for all transport providers we use in our trips, nor do we always know what type of transport a provider uses on a specific leg. For those, we assume the regional or national average. We are currently working on getting more information from providers via rail APIs and partnerships to make this data more accurate.

• We currently assume the regional average for sleeper trains, but know they are more carbon-intense as there are less passengers per carriage. We are working on getting this data in our system for more accurate calculations.

• We assume the national average CO2 per room per night for each country, which is based on data from larger hotel chains, as we don’t have more granular data from different accommodation providers or categories. We’re looking to work with the smaller hotels and accommodation APIs we partner with to improve on this.

• We assume the distance of a transport leg between two places is the distance between the two coordinates. This is a simplification, as we don’t have the exact kilometres per transport leg in our database yet. We are working on integrating transport APIs which will enable us to get the exact distance by rail between two places.

Ezra Jeffrey-Comeau

Individual actions matter

Each trip is labelled individually so you can see the impact you have by choosing slow travel. Your individual actions are hugely valuable and add up - as we have seen in our impact report, where last year over 1085 Byway passengers saved 170 tonnes of CO2. It also helps create a movement. Telling friends and family about your joyful overland holiday (and the carbon you saved) helps bring slow travel into the mainstream. We need this to reduce the carbon footprint of the industry, so we can all enjoy travel for many years to come. 

If you have any suggestions for how to improve this feature please send an email to hello@byway.travel