As talk about Covid-19's impact on travel quietened down, this year discussions about travel’s planetary impact become much louder. It was also the year that our Sustainability Futures report shed light on the opportunity to demystify and quantify eco-consciousness, a theme first explored in our Post-conscious Travel microtrend.
With 81% of global respondents saying they wanted to be more sustainable in 2021, according to Garnier, consumers and companies alike moved away from the encouragement of gratuitous destination-hopping and refocused their behaviours on planetary and social good. But sustainability has a language problem, which is why a new wave of innovators are trading in buzzwords to redefine what it means to travel consciously.
Trippin’s report replaced the term ‘sustainable travel’ with ‘purposeful travel’, addressing the lack of intersectionality in the sustainability movement. Then there’s the fact that the travel sector has recognised the role of regeneration – which offers a more tangible approach to sustainability that can be measured. Regenerative Travel has open-sourced a white paper that publishes data points for hotels to measure their planetary and social impact.