The IPCC tells us that unless there are immediate, rapid, and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting global warming to 1.5°C will be beyond reach.
Our mission is to make slow travel mainstream, and to highlight the joys of traveling through - by train, bus, boat, and bike - rather than flying over. Our vacations are 100% flight-free and our focus is on helping people love slow travel journeys, so that they’ll choose slow travel again because they want to, not because they ought to. When they do, and when they recommend that their friends do too, a collective social movement will be born - which will lead to significantly fewer planes in the air, and far fewer carbon emissions.
However, even a flight-free vacation has a carbon cost. That's why we declared a Climate Emergency, certified as a B Corp and became a founding signatory of the Glasgow Declaration. We’re committed to measuring and reducing that cost, while prioritizing routes that avoid hotspots already suffering the social and environmental impacts of overtourism. Here’s our plan for the next 12 months.
We’ll measure trip emissions and disclose them to customers
We'll measure and publish a carbon footprint label for each of our trips and publicly share our method, including with other travel companies, to help them do the same. Carbon labeling our trips means assigning a carbon cost to all of the accommodations and transportation legs used in our vacations, and adapting our itinerary pages to display this cost.
We’ll improve the measurement of our wider impact
Our trips are certainly less carbon-intensive than flying or driving to the same destinations, but if our customers hadn’t traveled with us, they wouldn’t have necessarily flown or driven to the same places. If a customer would have stayed home in their yard rather than taking a trip with us, we’re responsible for increasing emissions, not reducing them. We’ll introduce two impact questions to our booking form to help us understand what our customers would have done had they not vacationed with Byway, along with their ‘usual’ vacation behaviors, to understand the wider impact our trips are having in terms of catalyzing behavior shifts.
We’ll develop our tech and tooling to create lower carbon journeys
We'll develop our trip creation technology to prioritize routes and accommodation choices with a lower carbon footprint when dynamically creating trips for customers. We'll also begin developing tools to allow customers to reduce their trip’s footprint themselves, for example by choosing to take a local Scotrail service over the Glenfinnan Viaduct instead of taking the Jacobite Express on the same route.
We’ll allow places experiencing over-tourism room to regenerate
One of our company goals is to combat the environmental and social challenges of overtourism by limiting the appearance of existing 'hotspots' within our vacations, instead bringing tourism and economic opportunities to wonderful lesser-known areas.
We run an annual audit to identify the proportion of our trips that avoid tourism hotspots completely, and the proportion of places visited on our trips that constitute hotspots. Each year there are more places in our universe of potential trips that need to be classified, but because measurement of our baseline is crucial to understanding how much regeneration our trips are permitting, we'll continue to prioritize and finance this audit despite its growing complexity.
We'll also add this 'hotspot or not' classification to our trip-building technology and begin developing our tech to actively prioritize off-the-beaten-path locations over hotspots, and to limit the time in hotspots on the occasions that they are necessary. We plan to begin accounting for seasonality: many places that are hotspots in the high season have a dearth of tourists in the low season, and vice versa (think ski resorts and Christmas markets).
We’ll collaborate to help leisure travel decarbonize
We’ll continue to collaborate with our customers and stakeholders around our impact reporting, plans, progress, and risks. We’ll share our methodologies and experimental results with the wider industry, particularly through B Corp’s “B-Hive” community, the Tourism Declares online community, and the Travel by B Corp community. These communities also give us access to the data and learnings of other climate-focused travel companies, which we’ll use to challenge our own thinking and approaches and improve our methodologies.
We’ll continue to share the benefits of slow travel and our data on customer appetite for slow travel at industry events, including inviting other travel brands to partner with us to introduce slow travel to their own customers. Finally, we’ll continue to advocate for the joys of flight-free leisure travel in the press to help more vacationers become aware of low-hassle opportunities for slow travel and increase the proportion of travelers choosing flight-free vacations.
We’ll continue to invest in our climate goals
We will continue to divert the necessary team, tech investments, and funding to achieve these climate goals over the next twelve months.
Please email us at sustainability@byway.travel with any feedback, ideas, or questions - we’d love to hear from you.
Read about the art of slow travel, or why we love taking the local train.
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