How our carbon labeling works
Sjouke Op de Weegh
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, while 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 labeling for every trip!
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CO2 per trip
Find out how much CO2 your Byway vacation will cost, and how that compares to going by plane or car.
How do we calculate this?
Transportation
Each leg (a journey between A and B) in our database is tagged with its transportation provider
We have researched how much CO2 is produced per person per kilometer for each of these providers. (For providers that don’t report on this, we take the national average for that type of transportation, e.g. regional/national trains, buses, or ferries).
We then calculate the distance in km between the two coordinates of the leg
For each leg, we then multiply: distance x CO2 per passenger km x number of passengers
Accommodations
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 number 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 accommodations carbon footprint to the equivalent emissions for other transportation methods, using data from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
For cars: we take the equivalent of a gas car and assume there’s only one car per trip.
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 farthest city on the trip 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 <1,000km
Short-haul flights are between 1,000-2,000km
Long-haul flights are 2,000-5,000km
How we're improving this feature for the future
Our methodology makes some assumptions and isn't 100% accurate. Here are some of the areas that we're working to improve on:
We currently don’t have CO2 data for all transportation providers we use on our trips, nor do we always know what type of transportation a provider uses on a specific leg. For those, we assume the regional or national average. We're 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're more carbon-intensive as there are fewer passengers per train car. We're 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 accommodations providers or categories. We’re looking to work with the smaller hotels and accommodations APIs we partner with to improve on this.
We assume the distance of a transportation leg between two places is the distance between the two coordinates. This is a simplification, as we don’t have the exact kilometers per transportation leg in our database yet. We're working on integrating transportation APIs which will enable us to get the exact distance by rail between two places.
Ezra Jeffrey-Comeau
Individual actions matter
Each trip is labeled individually so you can see the impact you have by choosing slow travel. Your individual actions are hugely valuable and add up - as we've seen in our impact report, where last year over 1,085 Byway passengers saved 170 metric tons of CO2. It also helps create a movement. Telling friends and family about your joyful overland vacation (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
