Special Guest Blogger: Dorothee Vogel on Green Travel

Nate Elliott | December 19, 2007, 03:44 PM

Dorothee Vogel, Jupiter's European online commerce analyst and champion of green products and green marketing, is back with another guest blog:

While some travel suppliers are still heatedly discussing the relevance of carbon-offsetting schemes, lastminute.com’s involvement in the Carbonwise offsetting scheme stands as a unique success story. Lastminute.com said that after just six months offering carbon-offsetting to their online flight bookers, 10 percent of bookers were opting in to pay for an offset. Now after a full year, 15 percent are opting in. While there are certain short-haul routes which attract more than 20 percent opt-ins, long-haul routes which require higher contributions convert considerably fewer bookers.

Green attitudes of travel bookers have certainly found their way onto the marketing agenda of travel providers during the course of 2007. How to communicate and offer green travel alternatives however is still very much debated as hotel suppliers, tour operators and airlines revealed recently in London at the “Create a Travel Company that will grow in an era of climate change” conference.

"Stopping people traveling is certainly not the solution," said Jayne Austin-Price from Madinat Jumeirah luxury hotels. She knows she has to be sensible and careful when communicating with her up-market audience about sustainability – confrontation and guilt won’t sway these consumers. At the same time Jane Ashton from First Choice reported that their World Care Fund -- a voluntary opt-out contribution of 1.50 GBP per person matched by First Choice -- finds a 35 percent conversion rate. Interestingly, she also revealed that their older customer segment in higher income groups were most likely to opt out.

These observations confirm JupiterResearch’s findings in our recent Green Travel report about the UK’s unique status in terms of green publicity and product offerings amongst travel suppliers, and the importance placing such schemes within the purchase cycle. Furthermore, it highlights that there is an important attitudinal difference amongst online retail and travel buyers and even specific travel product buyers in their green attitudes and actions. This last point was driven home by Dan Jonasson from Sweden’s NaturesBest who said, that even though Scandinavians’ environmental awareness is very high their green attitudes don’t translate when it comes to travel and are largely ignored by suppliers.

JupiterResearch clients can read the full Green Online Travel Buyers report. Also don't forget to check out our recently-released data on the state of Green Shopping in Europe.