Achieving clarity on sustainable travel issues

So many issues facing the planet have become mainstream concerns in recent times and so many companies are looking to convince their travelling clients that they are responding. The cacophony of voices and messages is increasing, and at It’s Your Planet, we’re concerned that these undeniably good intentions will quickly become overshadowed by marketeers ‘spinning’ these messages to achieve differentiation for the inexorable drive for corporate profit.

Our goal is to help establish ongoing clarity in this regard, to cut through the often commercial or political bias that may overtly protect commercial gain, where that gain is doing harm. Further, we want to bring some clarity to the facts and figures being used across the industry, not just to verify them, but also to understand how they impact today’s traveller and the destinations they seek to explore.

Without a clear understanding of the issues and impacts, how can we expect travellers and destinations to embrace the science and eventual consequences of not acting now? How can we expect travellers to support sustainability or regenerative efforts if they cannot clearly see where their money is being spent or the value that is being derived from it? How can we convince the traveller that money obtained through such campaigns doesn’t just disappear into a local government fund, never to be seen again, or worse still, end up lost through corruption?

Successful sustainability and local destination regenerative efforts require clarity for travellers in the following areas:

1. What funds collected or added in the name of sustainable travel are being used for
2. Why they are being asked to contribute to sustainable travel initiatives
3. How and where their sustainable travel contributions are being spent
4. Just exactly what the travel and destination providers are doing as part of their sustainability and local regenerative initiatives, compared to what they are saying they are doing