Responsible tourism greenwashing
Greenwashing is where travel companies claim to be greener than they are in order to benefit from this in their marketing. Having worked hard to establish the concept of responsible tourism since 2000 obviously we are against these practices - however it's a sign of progress in some ways as when we launched nobody felt that there was any marketing value at all in responsible travel and tourism...Keeping our own house in order
We screen every tour company, every accommodation, and every single trip against our criteria for responsible tourism. We transparently publish tour companies overall responsible tourism policies, and the details for every single trip which you will see at the bottom of every holiday page.
There is no responsible tourism scheme for individual trips or itinaries and so we've had to screen over 300 tour companies ourselves since 2000. Where an accommodation has already been accredited by a reputable scheme we accept this. In many parts of the world these schemes do not exist and so again we've screened them ourselves.
Only 25% of the companies that approach us with an intention of joining the site pass all our criteria and end up being accepted. We are sadly unable to visit all the trips and places on the site but publish unedited reviews from travellers who have after booking via us. We ask them explicitly about their experiences and responsible travel. Every review is sent back to the tour operator who runs the trip or the hotel, and this valuable feedback helps them to improve their practices.
We monitor these reviews very closely, if a company we work with is found to has misrepresented its practices or greenwashed the holidays they offer then we seek an explanation before removing them from our site. Although our screening helps to remove greenwashing operators in advance, we have had to remove 17 companies who we have not been able to be confident about.
Campaigning against greenwashing in responsible tourism
In just six months in 2007, The Daily Telegraph's Travel desk received 142 emails from companies claiming to be green. The difficulty for readers was distinguishing between the good and the less good. In December 2007, The Telegraph asked responsibletravel.com to assist with the analysis of 40 of Britain's top travel companies in regards to responsible tourism (front cover of the paper above). The companies and categories were chosen by The Telegraph travel team and responsibletravel.com then began work with the paper to establish criteria and a ranking system on which all analysis would be based. Read more about our audit here.