Green or greenwash?

By Justin Francis, responsibletravel.com

We've always tried to be open and transparent about the way we work at responsibletravel.com, welcoming and encouraging your comments and reviews to help us improve, provide you with a better service and promote responsible tourism throughout the travel industry.

Last week, however, we had a call from The Observer newspaper - not looking for last minute responsibletravel.com holidays for their travel pages or for our comment on the latest carbon offset scheme, but to defend ourselves against accusations of greenwashing for their article, 'Are you being greenwashed?'.

Whether you read the article or not, we wanted to share our responses with you, our travellers, as they may answer questions you have had but never thought to ask! So here goes...

How did you come to be called 'responsible travel'?

In the article it is suggested that we have 'appropriated' the term responsible travel and appear to be an 'official industry portal'. We believe that in 2000 we were the first business to use the term responsible travel. A great many people told us it was a stupid name (most people told us that tourists just want to have fun on holiday and don't care about anything else - you've proved that this isn't the case!), and a great many more people told us 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 seems as if we are now being criticised for being too successful, after initially being told that we were mad to try - hey ho!

Why does responsibletravel.com offer holidays to Whistler?

The article focuses on skiing holidays to Whistler offered through responsibletravel.com 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 the number of UK holidays on the site for this to happen.

However, it does raise the question of why we promote trips that do involve a longer flight. We firmly believe that all holidays, wherever they are, can and should be more responsible. This is the only way we can create widespread change in tourism and in the countries we visit. Whistler is one of the greenest resorts, if not the greenest, in North America. And while we do offer lots of UK and European winter sports, if the responsible traveller wants to go to the US - or indeed lives there, as 10-15% of you do - then Whistler is your best bet.

How do you choose and check the companies that feature on responsibletravel.com?

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 (see a policy example), and specifics on responsible tourism on every single holiday page.

Many of the hotels on the site are already accredited by an independent scheme, however, there is no such thing for trips. We publish your unedited customer reviews both about your holiday experience and responsible tourism, and send every review back to the company who operate the holiday - your valuable feedback helps them improve their practices. Over the years we've taken 17 companies off the site because we have not been able to be confident that they would meet our criteria.

Is it true that you don't have very many small ecotourism businesses on the site?

As visitors to responsibletravel.com, you will probably already have discovered for yourselves that this simply isn't true. We're 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 we make no apology for that.

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 successful as a business we believe responsibletravel.com has done far more to persuade other businesses to follow suit than we would have done if we were a charity.

Over to you...

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.

We would love to get your thoughts on the issues raised here on our responsibletravel.com blog

Back to business news

Back to main news page