Travel has been extractive for far too long, with travellers taking from the people and places they visit while most of the money goes into corporate pockets. But there is a new way to travel, where sustainability tops every traveller’s list and every company’s agenda – and the travel industry needs to be doing everything in its power to be a part of this journey.

This message from Big Ambitions MD, Natalia Rosa, kick-started a recent webinar entitled ‘Sustainability: a non-negotiable for the future of tourism in Africa’ held during Africa Travel Week, building on the narrative around the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26.

Hilton Walker, Chief Marketing and Sales Officer, Great Plains Conservation, said the most important thing as an organisation these days was being open to consistently assessing how a company was impacting not only on the local environment, but also on communities, such as guests and local stakeholders.

“What we have found over the years, looking at other entities, is that this is where the rub occurs between financial stakeholders, businesses and intentions. For us, carbon offsetting and environmental sustainability etc. is not a transactional relationship, but an experiential relationship with our communities and environments.”

According to Walker, offsetting a company’s carbon footprint and its impact on the environment had to be something that businesses woke up to look at every single day. “Great Plains is in the situation now where we want to reduce our carbon footprint even more by 30% by 2030 and that becomes the tricky aspect.

“A lot of people struggle in the beginning to start offsetting their carbon footprints because they see it as a big capital outlay. The irony is that in our experience, once you get over that hurdle, you can actually make some serious savings on the bottom line in terms of your input costs. But as you get closer to that point of zero, it actually becomes harder because then you start going down to the finite and the minutiae and that is where the real excitement sits in terms of carbon offsetting and community work.”

He said the challenge had moved way beyond leaving a card on a bed for guests or changing to glass water bottles. “Those are the basic fundamentals of doing business now. Ultimately what we are seeing is that the guests staying with us, yes they want to have a safari experience, a cuisine experience and a wonderful stay in their rooms, but they actually want to know what we are doing behind the scenes. They are spending a lot more time engaging with our staff, digging deeper into that, and having an appreciation for what we are doing in terms of the community and conservation work.”

Making green choices easy

Inge Huijbrechts, Global Senior Vice President Sustainability, Security and Corporate Communications at the Radisson Hotel Group, said guest engagement like this was essential. The Radisson Hotel Group began this journey over 25 years ago with an environmental policy when no one was even talking about it, she said. This developed into a responsible business programme entitled ‘Think People, Think Community, Think Planet’, which permeated everything the group did in its 1 600 hotels in 120 countries.

“We reduced our carbon energy and water footprints by 30% over the last ten years so now we are working on our science-based targets so that’s going to be the commitment to go to net zero by 2050 and making that work for this diversified group around the world.”

She said the Green Key eco-label was a big part of sustainability success as well as the focus on green buildings, such as the five-star Radisson RED Cape Town. “We don’t own the buildings that we operate so we work with the owners to make the buildings greener, which reduces the carbon footprint.”

As part of the ‘Think People’ side, the Park Inn by Radisson Cape Town Newlands had a cooperation with the Deaf Federation of SA (Deaf SA) where 30% of staff members were hard of hearing, she elaborated. “This is amazing because it has created so much acceptance with guests because these colleagues are front of house and part of operations. Just by having that example of our wonderful colleagues in the hotel, we have seen more acceptance and integration of differently abled people in other hotels, mainly in SA, where we have had good success with that.”

Hotels needed to make it easy for guests to get involved and make green choices, she continued. “For our B2B clients, we have made all of our events worldwide carbon neutral. We do that offsetting automatically and for the clients otherwise it becomes too complex for them and they don’t want to invest. We make that an experience thing as well and we do that with the renewable energies such as hydropower and wind power. On each of the continents where we are, we support community projects where guests can attend if there is an event and take a certificate home.”

Making an impact

Paul Gardiner, CEO Mantis Collection, agreed that getting guests to go behind the scenes was increasingly relevant. “We launched a programme called Mantis Impact where guests, as an example, get opportunities to go out with wildlife vets to be part of a rhino encounter to collar and dehorn them. We do about three or four a year and save those specific moments for our guests now. I call it the Jurassic Park Effect; you know when they came across that great big dinosaur that was dying and just felt it breathe and so on.”

Gardiner also spoke about a master plan for what he said would become a very unique reserve – the first urban private game reserve – between Port Elizabeth (Gqeberha) and Uitenage (Kariega) that would serve as a halfway house for species in trouble. As an example, the reserve would attempt to rewild some of the elephants in Knysna as well as rescue and rewild lions from the banned canned lion hunting industry. “The biggest part is that we are bolted on to a huge community on the border of the game reserve and we have multiple projects to get them engaged with the reserve.”

The bottom line to stay ahead of the curve, though, was that offsetting needed to begin before the guests even arrived, said Walker, and that communication needed to be authentic and not come across as greenwashing.

“The offsetting of 1.5% is actually not good enough. We need to go to 3%. If we get to 1.5% we are going to remain where we are right now and we are already seeing the effects of climate change. We need to move the needle downward to 3% and then we can start reversing the impacts that we have.”