Promoting Sustainable Travel
The Institute of Tourism at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, in collaboration with Kuoni, has conducted a broad study regarding customer demand of sustainable travel packages. It was established that 22% of customers consider sustainability as one of the top three deciding factors when booking travel packages.
Particular attention is paid to customers who have expressed wishes for sustainable travel packages. Kuoni strives to continually increase the sustainability of its products and offer a wide range of sustainable products to its customers. Firstly, Kuoni collaborates closely with its most important hotel partners to improve the sustainability of hotels in the mass market. Secondly, Kuoni works with NGO and industry partners to develop new sustainable products. Thirdly, to counter the effects of travel on climate change, customers are offered compensation tickets for their flight emissions.
ananea: Sustainable Travel & Volunteering
The name of Kuoni’s sustainable product line ‘ananea’ is derived from Greek and means “renewal”. And that is what ananea is all about: a new way of travel. Unforgettable nature, authentic encounters, respectful travel towards people and the environment and the opportunity to get involved. ananea contains sustainable hotels, individual and guided tours, as well as volunteering opportunities. The latter are designed in collaboration with NGOs, experts and local partners in sustainability and are geared to provide customers with unique travel experiences while at the same time creating value for the local population and environment. Read more about ananea.
Travelife Awards
Apart from the flight to the holiday destination the accommodation has the highest social and environmental impact of a travel. By collaborating with hotels to improve their sustainability performance, Kuoni attempts to minimize the negative impact of its business activities. Working with the sustainability certification scheme Travelife allows Kuoni not only to monitor its core hotels but provides a means of communicating hotel’s sustainability performance to customers and gives them the choice to spend their vacation in a sustainably managed hotel. Read more here.
Fair Trade + Travel
Fair Trade Travel offers the opportunity to realise forms of tourism that are economically, ecologically and socially sustainable. This kind of tourism meets the expectations of both the tourists wanting relaxing holidays and local people at the destination wanting to maintain their livelihoods, cultural diversity and dignity. Kuoni is therefore proud to offer its UK and Swiss clients the world’s first-ever Fair Trade Travel (FTT) certified package through its sustainable product line, ananea. With this product offering, Kuoni has also become the first tour operator in the UK to be Fair Trade certified. Read more here.
Offering carbon offsets
The consequences of climate change will have a major effect on the tourist sector over the next few years, and of course the tourist sector makes its own contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why Kuoni collaborates with two exemplary carbon offsetting organisations, myclimate and Green Seat, to offer our clients high-quality offsets for their flight emissions. Since we began offering carbon offsets to our Swiss customers in 2009, sales have increased 465%. Read about how our clients have helped reduce their environmental impact through the purchase of these offsets here.
Sustainable Travel Tips
We want to offer travel that is and remains a truly wonderful experience not just for you but also for the people and the natural environment at and around your chosen destination. “Fair travel” means respecting other cultures, cultivating true partnerships with people in the host country, travelling with due environmental care and concern, and ensuring that the local people also benefit from the tourist travel experience in both material and more abstract terms. Read the tips found here to see how you can play your part.
Improving dialogue with our customers
Kuoni UK and Kuoni Nordic have taken strides to engage their clients on sustainability issues through three new and exciting initiatives. Read about them below.
BBC’S Simon Reeve engages with UK clients
BBC TV travel presenter Simon Reeve (Equator, Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn) made exclusive appearances at nine of Kuoni’s own travel stores and three of Kuoni’s Partnership Stores across the UK in May 2012. Over 1000 residents joined Kuoni in chatting with Reeve, an adventurer and bestselling author with a passion for travel, wildlife, conservation and the environment, as he talked about his latest epic adventure series ‘Indian Ocean’.
Reeve focused on the impact on nature due to immense population growth that he has seen in his 10 years of travel and encouraged each attendee to do their part – no matter how small – in protecting the environment. His series showcases various environmental initiatives, including a visit to a coral reef protection project and highlights local beachcomber entrepreneurs who recycle the world’s discarded flip-flops into toys.
Kuoni Nordic introduces a new social media platform
Apollo Sweden (Kuoni Nordic) launched a platform addressing sustainable tourism called “En bättre resa”, roughly translated as “A Better Journey”. The format of the platform captures both facts and figures on Corporate Responsibility performance as well as an interactive blog and links to facebook. Kuoni Nordic’s Corporate Responsibility Coordinator hosts the blog, authoring posts on a wide variety of sustainability issues in toursim – from the prevention of the sexual exploitation of children to knowing if your hotel is sustainable. The platform has about 500 visitors per day. Take a look here.
Kuoni UK launched the Holiday Health Experiment
This year six lucky individuals were selected by Kuoni UK and Nuffield Health, the UK’s largest healthcare charity, to journey to radically different parts of the world as part of a unique study called ‘The Holiday Health Experiment’. The experiment aims to better understand the health impact of different types of holiday on the wellbeing of the body and mind. Before, during and after the trips all six individuals underwent a variety of medical and psychological tests to look at the effects ‘everyday life’ has on the body and mind. The data was then compared to that gathered during and after the holiday.
Two of the participants travelled with Kuoni’s sustainable travel line ananea. The pair spent two weeks as volunteers on Earthwatch's Amazon riverboat expedition surveying wildlife in the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve. Earthwatch is an international non-profit organisation that since 1971 has seen over 93,000 volunteers join forces with scientists in the field as research assistants.
Results of the Holiday Health Experiment showed that two weeks after returning home, holidaymakers’ sleep quality, their bodies’ ability to recover from stress and their blood pressures were significantly improved compared to the control group who did not have a holiday. The full results of the study are available online.