RESPONSIBLE TRAVEL SAY THAT OBSERVER SHOULD LOOK AT OWN GREEN TRAVEL PURCHASING

In responding to an Observer investigative article, Justin Francis of Responsible Travel makes the point that, even though the Observer trades on its ethical positioning, Observer reader offers are run by a company with no published policy for responsible tourism.

Last week the Observer ran an article accusing Responsible Travel of operating a less-than-green operation. Amongst the accusations, the Observer said that Responsible Travel looked like an official site, companies had to pay to be on the Responsible Travel site, there was a preponderance of big operators and Responsible sold too many long haul ski trips.

The full Responsible Travel response is as follows:

“Today The Observer published a critical article concerning ‘greenwashing’ in travel, with several references to us. We welcome debate around all the ethical issues in tourism, and have a policy of transparency and inviting feedback on how we might improve. However as some of our responses to the journalist have not been published in the article I’m going to reply in more detail here.

It is claimed that we have ‘appropriated’ the term responsible travel and appear that we are an ‘official industry portal’. I believe that in 2000 we were the first business to use the term responsible travel. A great many people told me that it was a stupid name (most people told me that tourists just want to have fun on holiday and don’t care about anything else), and a great many more people told me we would never make a business out of it. Since then we’ve worked extremely hard to build customer awareness of a different type of respectful travel.

Rather than appropriating ‘responsible travel’ we have spent 7 hard years trying to build consumer awareness of the concept from scratch. Nowhere have we ever claimed to be an ‘industry portal’, in fact quite the opposite – we’ve always been very proud of our business roots. No other business has yet tried to do this on our scale, but this is hardly our fault! It feels that we are being criticised for being too successful, after initially being told that we were mad to try -hey ho!

The writer picks on skiing holidays to Whistler and claims that many of our skiing holidays are long haul. A closer look at the winter holidays section on our site shows that the majority of them in fact involve shorter trips. Interestingly, the most popular destination on the site overall is now the UK. We spent a lot of time and effort increasing our UK holiday offer to ensure that this could happen.

However, it does raise the question of why we promote trips that do involve a longer flight. I firmly believe that all holidays, wherever they are, can and should be more responsible. Only in this way can we create widespread change in tourism and tourism destinations. Whistler is one of, if not the greenest resorts in North America. While, as above, we offer lots of UK and European winter sports, if the responsible traveller wants to go to the US – or lives there as 10-15% of our site visitors do – then Whistler is your best bet.

Providing a tour company meets our criteria for responsible tourism I make no judgements about whether they are independently owned or part of a larger group as this would be wholly unfair and unreasonable, and would confine responsible tourism to a niche and limit the change we can create – it they are good enough they are welcome.

Only 25% of the companies who approach us for membership end up meeting our criteria and joining our site. We publish their detailed responsible tourism polices on the site (example here), and specifics on responsible tourism on every single holiday page. Many of the hotels on the site are already accredited by by an independent scheme, however there is no such thing for trips. We publish unedited customer reviews concerning both the tourists experience and responsible tourism, and send every review back to the company who operate the holiday -this valuable feedback helps them improve their practices. Over the years we’ve removed 17 companies because we have not been able to be confident that they would meet our criteria.

On the subject of transparency I wish The Observer – a business which itself claims an ethical positioning – were as tough with choosing their reader offers (run by a company with no published policy for responsible tourism) and travel advertisers as we are with choosing the companies we promote!

We are criticised for charging tour companies a commission to be on the site. To my knowledge every travel agent in the world charges a commission, and we are no different except that ours is lower than most. This means that we have become an effective marketing channel for a great many small tour companies and hotels all over the world (including community based tourism ventures which are charged nothing).

The statement that tiny ecotourism businesses are less likely to be found on our site is badly informed and incorrect. I’m very proud of the very many, very small companies that we’ve helped over the years, and of the benefits that tourism has brought to the people and destinations in which they operate. It is only by being a successful business that we’ve been able to do this – and I make no apology for that.

At the other end of the scale, we are fully aware of the considerable impact that large travel companies can make in encouraging adoption of responsible tourism practices throughout the industry – as is commented on towards the end of The Observer’s article, “…they have the power to make sure all their suppliers on the ground take action”. It is for this reason that back in 2004 we targeted 3 of the then big 4 travel companies to create and implement responsible tourism policies. This campaign was reported and recognised by The Observer at the time.

We also engage with larger operators through initiatives such as our annual Responsible Tourism Awards. We founded the Awards on the principle that all types of tourism – from niche to mainstream – can and should be operated in a way that respects and benefits destinations and local people, and that travel companies, individuals and organisations (big or small, businesses, charities or not-for-profits) who are leading the way should be celebrated to inspire others.

I think that some people get confused and think that only charities can create positive social and environmental change. In fact businesses and charities can, and indeed must do this if we are to create a better world. By proving that we can be commercially successful I think responsibletravel.com has done far more to persuade other businesses to follow suit than we would have done if we were a charity.

So, finally we welcome the debate and the scrutiny. There has been no route map for responsibletravel.com to follow, we are not perfect and we are determined to improve. I do, however, wish The Observer put as much scrutiny into some of the issues in mass tourism as they have into responsible tourism, as it is there that most of the impacts of tourism lie.

Valere Tjolle