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THE : FUTURE : LABORATORY THOmsOn HOLidAYs : sUsTAinABLE HOLidAY FUTUREs

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Introduction : 04Puncturing The Sustaino-myths : 06A New World Order : 12Facing The Music : 16Medium-Term Trends : 24Medium- to Long-Term Trends : 28Sustainable Travel: Key Take-Outs : 34

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Introduction

Now the global tourism industry is looking to change the game again by recapturing the optimism of those days to suggest that holidays for the many, rather than exclusive resorts for the few, will hold the key to sustainable travel in the future.

‘We’re in the middle of a revolution in tourism, and how it can play a part in this societal change,’ says Professor Geoffrey Lipman, special advisor to the secretary-general of the UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO). ‘The big things playing a fundamental part in that change are mindset, technology and financing.

‘Travel has to be made sustainable,’ he continues. ‘The difficulty is in convincing people of the need. Once you’ve done this, change is exponential.’

The challenges are formidable. The dream of affordable travel for all is being obscured by climate change, future long-term projections of rising fuel prices and a growing awareness among consumers that sustainability and responsible travel are set to have an impact on how we understand, embrace and manage our holiday plans.

It will mean a delicate high-wire act for the industry. Energy experts are united in predicting that oil prices will rise substantially in the coming years, offering differing maximum price levels depending on how well governments deliver sustainable energy policies.

In its High Oil Price study, released in April 2010, the US Government’s Energy Information Administration projects prices rising to a maximum of $210 per barrel (in real dollars) by 2035.

The International Energy Agency foresees the average IEA crude oil price reaching $113 per barrel (in terms of what the US dollar was worth in 2009) by the same year, according to its World Energy Outlook 2010, released on November 9, 2010.

These projected prices rises could clearly threaten to make cheap flights a thing of the past without decisive action by government and the global travel industry.

It’s already possible to see the shape of government response, with many countries around the world gearing up to introduce regimes of carbon taxes and cap-and-trade schemes that will further increase operating costs and make travel less affordable.

The British government, for example, increased Air Passenger Duty by up to 55% on November 9, projected by the Treasury to generate £3.8bn a year in taxes by 2015.

This is part of Energy Minister Chris Huhne’s plan to increase the proportion of government revenue raised by taxes – targeting the motoring and travel industries – from 7.7% to 10% within five years. That represents a rise of £15bn annually, from £35bn to £50bn, the equivalent of an extra £800 year from every UK taxpayer.

Consumers, however, are only just beginning to adjust to the idea that sustainability will have to be a genuine and integral part of every holiday by 2030. A survey of 1,007 UK holidaymakers conducted for this report demonstrated a high level of indifference to sustainable questions:

: 70% had no opinion about the relative environmental impact of chartered versus scheduled flights.

: 61% had no opinion when asked whether a resort’s shower facilities or swimming pool are responsible for the highest water usage.

: 64% had no opinion when asked what a sustainable hotel room might look like.

Against such findings, Jane Ashton, head of sustainable development at Thomson Holidays, believes tour operators will be key to leading their customers into a brave new world of greener travel. ‘Our customers expect us to provide the infrastructure to enable them to holiday more sustainably,’ she says. ‘Our research shows that our customers want us to take care of sustainability issues for them. So our challenge is to influence destinations and hotels to supply an infrastructure that allows our customers to be more sustainable.’

Mass tourism was one of the great game-changers of the 20th century. The advent of cheap flights meant travel was no longer the preserve of a wealthy elite, freeing millions of people to travel the globe and dramatically widening the horizons, tastes and expectations of an entire generation in the developed world.

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Nevertheless, industry insiders remain confident that mass-market sustainability is an achievable goal. ‘We have a great track record in turning dreams into reality,’ said Giovanni Bisignani, director general and CEO of the International Air Transport Association. ‘In 50 years, we moved from the Wright Brothers’ Flyer to the jet age.’

‘Now we are about to take another big step forward – into an age of considered consumption, in which the travel industry will provide consumers with choices that enable them to demonstrate their eco-credentials in a way that suits them, as well as the planet they inhabit,’ says Bisignani.

‘Potential building blocks for a carbon-free future already exist. Fuel-cell technology is here. Solar-powered aircraft are being built. And we can make fuel from biomass – algae – today,’ he added.

Innovators are also working on large-scale resorts that clean up pollution (examples in our Room With A View box out, page 21) and lessen their impact on the environment, and on next-generation aircraft such as Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, which will be in excess of 20% more fuel-efficient.

This report shares and amplifies the sense of optimism about the future of mass tourism. When looking at what is new and upcoming in tomorrow’s travel, the report discovers innovators in the field combining the tactics suggested by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s influential book, Nudge, with fascinating breakthroughs in green technologies and intriguing lines of counter-intuitive thinking. These innovations are gently leading customers towards the realisation that mass tourism and sustainability are not mutually-exclusive concepts.

Our report predicts that during the next 20 years, UK travellers will:

: face up to Water Shame and agree to pay for H2O on holiday – but expect Wi-fi and in-room entertainment for free

: take Tradecations, cooperating with radical plans by hotels and resorts to slash their carbon footprint in return for carbon reward points that can be traded for visits to local sites of interest, spa treatments or dinner and drinks

: become Carbo-tourists who comparison-check the carbon emissions from their flights, via websites such as www.jpmorganclimatecare.com

: go on Philanthro-trips, ‘fly-and-swap’ holidays at which extra days or pampering packages can be earned from a resort by agreeing to spend time with a local charity or community organisation

: pick up hi-tech Responsible Traveller technology at the airport that will let them slash their hotel energy, carbon and water usage

: embrace Slowtopianism, long, leisurely trips on board a new generation of state-of-the-art airships that will replace and supplement some of today’s fuel-hungry jets

: Holiday on zero-impact floating islands that can be moved from one exotic location to another, producing their own food and water with no carbon emissions or pollution or damage to the environment

: Discover the joys of holiday super-hubs and aerovilles as a new integrated global rail and sail network replaces domestic and regional air travel

‘Our research shows that our customers want us to take care of sustainability issues for them. So our challenge is to influence destinations and hotels to supply an infrastructure that allows our customers to be more sustainable.’

Jane Ashton, head of sustainable development, Thomson Holidays

70%of the British public had no opinion about the relative environmental impact of chartered versus scheduled flights


Puncturing the sustaino-mythsOur report, which surveyed more than 1,000 holidaymakers in the UK, along with key industry experts – including author Leo Hickman, Greentraveller.com founder Richard Hammond, chair of judges of the Green Travel list Dr Graham Miller, and sustainability advisor at Forum For The Future, Vicky Murray – flags up the first big challenge facing the travel industry’s bid to reach a more sustainable future: challenging the myths about sustainable holidays in the public mind.

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The Benidorm Effect

It is informative to look at the first of these myths in more detail because it illustrates how misguided many British travellers remain in their assessment of the carbon impact of different types of holiday.

The reality, according to our panel of experts, which also included founder of Worldchanging.com Jamais Cascio, TreeHugger.com president and COO Ken Rother, TUI’s group environment manager James Whittingham and Holly Hughes, author of Frommer’s 500 Places to See Before They Disappear, is very different.

The statistics make startling reading. A two-week yachting holiday in the Caribbean uses six times more carbon than a package trip to Benidorm. A two-week beach holiday to Spain for a family of four will produce about 2.2 tonnes of carbon, while the same family’s Caribbean fortnight-long sailing trip would emit about 11.9 tonnes. If our family of four decided to book a hiking tour in Chile instead, they would be responsible for a total carbon emission of about 15.8 tonnes. *

There are other environmental advantages to the package holiday that point the way to a sustainable future for tourism that is a million miles away from the commonly-held vision of an exclusive eco-resort in the Maldives, says Leo Hickman, author of The Final Call: In Search of the True Cost of Our Holidays.

By concentrating large numbers of tourists in one place and encouraging them to collaborate in improving the location’s carbon-effectiveness, package holiday hubs can better manage resources, become more sustainable and have less environmental impact than luxury boutique resorts catering for small numbers spread across a wide area, argues Hickman.

‘Benidorm is one of the most eco-friendly places to go’, he says. ‘It is far better to concentrate the use of water and power than to have people out in their villas with a private pool.’

Thomson’s Ashton agrees. ‘A trip to a carbon-efficient, mature resort that is geared up to efficiently manage the waste and water needs of mainstream tourism can have a lower environmental impact than a long-haul holiday to an apparently eco-friendly hotel,’ she says.

Indeed, like many of our experts, Hickman challenges the idea that tomorrow’s sustainable resorts will be spread out, low-visibility places on the edge of our deserts, jungles, savannahs and atolls.

He believes we will witness the rise of mass-travel hyper-resorts and super-holiday hubs, where all experiences – from spas to clubs to beaches to outdoor recreational facilities – will be readily accessible, and anything that wastes energy carefully managed and monitored.

‘These hubs will be like large theme parks,’ says Hickman, ‘and may be the way Britons choose to get their fly-and-flop holidays in the future.’

Of those surveyed about their attitudes and understanding of sustainable travel :

: 46% admitted that they didn’t understand what sustainable tourism means

: 56% said they believed a sustainable holiday would cost them more and believed it would be ‘less luxurious’

: 34% believe that traditional package holidays in resorts such as Benidorm are not sustainable, despite recent research that suggests that ‘high-density, low-impact’ resorts are better for the environment in the long term if they are managed properly

* All figures are based on a family of four, flying from London Heathrow or Gatwick, with carbon calculations from Climate Care website. Hotel carbon figures supplied by TUI UK internal data. Yacht carbon usage from boatbookings.com


Committed realists

It is clear that many of those surveyed are keen to find a way through the haze of multiple sustaino-myths and want to become more proactive in making tomorrow’s holidays, and the places and resorts we stay in, more sustainable:

: 74% of UK adults say they are willing to change their behaviour and act more sustainably on holiday in the future

: More than 90% of travellers say they have the evidence they need about global warming to convince them to change their ways

: 29% are prepared to reduce the water and energy they use on holidays

: 34% say they would act sustainably if they were given more information on sustainable holidays

This report suggests that the need to guide the expectations, habits and attitudes of an initially-reluctant mass customer base towards a projected future of sustainable travel as the norm will require a complex, intriguing and, some would argue, counter-intuitive response from the travel industry.

The need over the next decade to satisfy new and growing tourist etiquette on the one hand, and the demands of social, environmental and legislative changes on the other will call for a radical shift in how sustainable holidays – and more particularly sustainable holidaymakers – will look, feel, think and behave.

The New Mass Travel landscape

To understand the scale and speed of the response that will be required, we only need to consider the predicted expansion of the mass travel market in the next decade.

International arrivals are expected to reach nearly 1.6bn by the year 2020, according to UNWTO’s Tourism 2020 Vision forecast, figures confirmed in November for this report by a spokesperson. Of those, 1.2bn will be intra-regional and 378m will be long-haul travellers.

The total tourist arrivals by region forecast shows that by 2020 the top three receiving regions will be Europe (717m tourists), East Asia and the Pacific (397m) and the Americas (282m), followed by Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

As the burgeoning Chinese and Indian middle classes begin to travel the world, East Asia and the Pacific, Asia, the Middle East and Africa are forecast to record growth in tourist arrivals of more than 5% a year, compared with the world average of 4.1%.

The more mature regions of Europe and the Americas are expected to show lower-than-average growth rates. Europe will maintain the highest share of world tourist arrivals, although this is forecast to decline from 60% in 1995 to 46% in 2020.

Long-haul travel worldwide will grow faster, at 5.4% a year between 1995 and 2020, than intra-regional travel, which is expected to grow by 3.8%.

Under a business-as-usual model, carbon dioxide emissions from tourism and travel, which currently accounts for about 5% of total global emissions, are projected to increase by 130% by 2035, says the UNWTO’s 2009 background paper From Davos to Copenhagen and Beyond: Advancing Tourism’s Response to Climate Change.

74%of UK adults say they are willing to change their behaviour and act more sustainably on holiday in the future

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‘We have budget accommodation from just £2 a night and we work with rural and agricultural communities to ensure that even a small amount of tourism brings them an income,’ says the website’s responsible tourism awards manager Alex Lyons.

: 56% of respondents believe they would experience less luxury and more problems if they chose a sustainable option

The Port Antonio boutique hotel in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica guarantees well-paid work for people living nearby, protects the local environment and has state-of-the-art energy and water conservation technology. But it has an elegant luxuriousness that won it a place in Frommer’s 150 Most Romantic Caribbean Hideaways.

Sustainable Travel Myths

Public perceptions about sustainable travel are still confused. We tackle the myths revealed by our survey of 1,007 UK holidaymakers:

: 34% of respondents believe that traditional package tours to Benidorm are not sustainable

A two-week package trip to Benidorm for a family of four, flying from London Gatwick to Alicante and staying in a hotel, produces about 2.2 tonnes of carbon emissions, according to Climate Care’s carbon calculator.

A fortnight-long yachting trip to the Caribbean for the same family, flying from London Gatwick to Barbados, clocks up 11.2 tonnes of carbon, almost six times more than the trip to Spain.

Meanwhile, an eco-hiking tour in Chile, based on our family of four flying from London Heathrow to Chile, emits 15.8 tonnes of carbon, seven times more than a holiday in Benidorm.

: 56% of respondents think a sustainable holiday would be more expensive

A ‘kids-and-kasbah’ itinerary in Morocco, including a visit to the Argan Oil Women’s Cooperative, and only staying in local hotels and dining in independent restaurants, costs from £679 for 8 nights, including flights, from Responsibletravel.com.

All figures are based on a family of four, flying from London Heathrow or Gatwick, with carbon calculations from Climate Care website. Hotel carbon figures supplied by TUI UK internal data. Yacht carbon usage from boatbookings.com

‘Benidorm is one of the most eco-friendly places to go. It is far better to concentrate the use of water and power than to have people out in their villas with a private pool.’

Leo Hickman, author, The Final Call: In Search of the True Cost of Our Holidays

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Clearly, these projected increases in mass tourism will have big ramifications for resources, energy supply, social and cultural integrity, and environmental conservation around the globe.

‘This crisis will be a trigger for transformation,’ says Jamais Cascio, Research Fellow at the Institute for the Future in California. ‘We are moving into a new age – socially, environmentally and economically.’

In addition, this report has identified three key economic, environmental and cultural drivers that further ensure that business as usual is not a viable option.

A New World Order

Impending energy crisis

Peak oil – the moment at which oil demand permanently outstrips oil supply, causing prices to rise and production to decline – is a controversial subject, but one that respected and influential experts increasingly see as inevitable.

A German military think tank, the Bundeswehr Transformation Center, says peak oil was reached this year. The United States Government’s Joint Operating Environment 2010 report says the first of a wave of resultant oil shocks could hit the world as early as 2012.

80%The percentage the British government plans to reduce carbon emissions to, by 2050

The UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security stated in a recent report: ‘We must plan for a world in which oil prices are likely to be higher and more volatile, and where oil price shocks have the potential to destabilise economic, political and social activity.’

Against this sobering background, the US Government’s Energy Information Administration suggests that oil prices could reach a maximum of $210 per barrel by 2035 compared to average crude oil prices of about $83 per barrel this winter expected by the US Energy Information Administration (November 9th), causing enormous rises in all transport costs, including air ticket prices.


Climate change

Anthropogenic climate change – caused by humans - is accepted by the majority of politicians and scientists. Extreme weather events causing unprecedented loss of human life and property damage recorded by the World Meteorological Organisation in 2010 included a record heatwave and wildfires in the Russian Federation, monsoon flooding in Pakistan and rain-induced landslides in China.

Spring is arriving 11 days earlier on average and average temperatures are about 1°C higher in central England than in the 1970s, pushing fish populations to migrate up to 44km further north in a search for cooler waters, according to How Well Prepared is the UK for Climate Change? First Report of the Adaptation Sub-Committee, September 16 2010.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a 0.6m rise in global sea levels and increases in floods, droughts and tropical cyclones by 2100, flooding habitats, affecting global food production and forcing millions of people in low-lying lands such as Bangladesh to relocate.

Dramatic, often tragic weather events linked to climate change, such as the recent floods in Pakistan, are starting to reshape the consciousness of the travelling public. ‘People are starting to see the effect of global warming through the changing weather patterns. It brings it closer to home and makes people want to change their ways,’ says Frommer’s 500 Places to See Before They Disappear author Holly Hughes.

‘This crisis will be a trigger for transformation. We are moving into a new age – socially, environmentally and economically.’

Jamais Cascio, research fellow, Institute for the Future, California

Eco-legislation

This is a potential double-whammy for the travel industry, with governments worldwide predicted to impose personal carbon quotas by respected futurologists such as IDEO’s climate change team.

The British government’s plan to reduce carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 would give UK citizens an annual carbon quota of just 3.1 tonnes per person, making the use of about 2.5 tonnes of CO2 on a return flight to Cancún an unattractive proposition.

Such low quotas will encourage families to carbon-comparison shop, driving home the realisation that a two-week ‘fly-and-flop’ package holiday for four that generates 2.2 tonnes of carbon emissions is still possible. A two-week yachting holiday in the Caribbean generating 11.9 tonnes, and a hiking tour producing 15.77 tonnes will only be viable for those rich enough to buy more quota.

‘Households will need to decide if they will spend their carbon credits on heating their home or flying somewhere on holiday,’ says Forum for the Future’s Murray.

The UK’s coalition government is exploring rewards for airline operators that are more fuel-efficient and have high load factors.


‘Households will need to decide if they will spend their carbon credits on heating their home or flying somewhere on holiday.’

Vicky Murray, senior sustainability advisor, Forum for the Future

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: Machu Picchu, Peru

More than 2m tourists a year make the trek 2,430m above sea level to visit the ‘Lost City of the Incas’. So alarming is the rate of damage to the site that UNESCO has listed it as one of the top 10 world sites in danger, a situation that is set to worsen as Peru’s Congress recently voted in support of building a new access road to the fragile ruins.

: Angkor, Cambodia

Among the most important archaeological sites in Southeast Asia, the Angkor Archaeological Park receives thousands of tourists per year, with arrivals to the region rising by 243% from 2000 to 2009.

: The Treasury, Petra, Jordan

Built in the 6th century BC, the Treasury at Petra in Jordan now receives nearly a million visitors a year. With an absence of visitor management, the iconic ‘lost city’ is in danger of being lost for ever, and is featured on the Global Heritage Fund’s 2010 list of cultural sites on the verge of vanishing.

: Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Egypt

Drawn to the tomb for the Pharaoh poster boy, Tutankhamun and his New Kingdom peers, the thousands of tourists who flock to the Valley of the Kings are damaging the site beyond repair. Evaporated sweat, climbing on the stones and graffiti are all taking their toll on these icons of Ancient Egypt.

: Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania

The snow that decks Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest free-standing mountain in the world, could disappear as early as 2022, according to a recent Ohio State University study, with climate change partly to blame.

: Dengfeng, China

Local heritage officials have recently restricted the volume of tourists visiting the spiritual centre of Dengfeng, whose historic monuments reflect different ways of perceiving ‘the centre of heaven and earth’ and were added this year to the World Heritage List.

: The Taj Mahal, India

One of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World, the Taj Mahal is in danger of losing its sparkle as levels of air and water pollution rise in the region, discolouring the iconic white marble and polluting the neighbouring Yamuna River.

: The Maldives

This group of low-lying coral islands in the Indian Ocean, the epitome of luxurious beach holidays, is already suffering from the effects of climate change. Rising sea levels, coastal erosion and increased ocean temperatures mean that inhabitants of some islands have been relocated.

: Fiji, South Pacific

The government of this collection of more than 800 volcanic and coral islands recently set up a new committee to oversee the reduction of the impact of climate change, which has been felt in rising sea levels and droughts alongside increased rainfall.

: The Great Barrier Reef, Australia

The largest coral reef in the world and home to thousands of species, including one third of the world’s soft coral, the Great Barrier Reef is at great risk due to climate change. Increases in water temperature, rising sea levels and ocean acidification pose a threat to the World Heritage site and its inhabitants.

10 Places You May Never See Before You Die

Traveller attitudes

Our survey may indicate that sustainability is not a priority for travellers, but a survey of 766 members of the Guardian News and Media consumer Brand Air Panel suggests that strong support for sustainability in other walks of life will trickle down into travel decisions in the near future.

More than 80% of respondents highlighted CO2 emissions, pollution and the over-use of resources as key concerns. More than 60% said they think about ethics when buying clothing and more than 80% think about the environment when purchasing groceries or transport.

Tellingly for the travel industry’s future, more than 80% indicated that energy, manufacturing and transport sectors place high importance on environmental sustainability.


Our team of experts felt that a switch to the tactics of sustainability by the travel industry was vital and inevitable. They predicted that any attempt to maintain a business-as-usual model would have serious and wide-ranging consequences – financially, environmentally and logistically – for all sectors, but especially for the travel industry.

Facing The Music

Desertification

According to Dr Graham Miller, a specialist in sustainable travel management at the University of Surrey, the over-use of water in areas of scarcity could turn British tourist favourites such as the Mediterranean basin or Israel’s Dead Sea into dry and barren wastelands. ‘Based on projections from the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, desertification and water scarcity will be a big problem as places become warmer and dryer,’ he explains.

Similarly, in September the United Nations Environment Programme called for governments and lawmakers to integrate environmental concerns into water use legislation to avert an impending global water crisis in a report entitled Greening Water Law. Even today tankers are being used to bring water to tourist spots such as Cyprus or mainland Spain.

‘Shipping in water for the pools shows that the industry is just not sustainable,’ says author Hickman. ‘In every place that I went, water was the biggest tourist problem.’

Hickman predicts that these regions will fall back on water taxes to control usage. ‘It will suddenly become very expensive to fly, flop and sip cocktails by a pool on the Costa Brava,’ he says.

$210Projected price of crude oil per barrel (in real dollars) by 2035

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Carbon Reporting

Travel organisations based in the UK, including hotel groups, airlines and tour operators, could soon find their reputation as environmentally-responsible global players hanging on how well, and how transparently, they account for the carbon they emit.

Under a new requirement of the Companies Act, firms may be legally obliged to include a record of their carbon emissions for the year in their annual report, in the same way that they currently outline their financial position.

Companies with overseas operations may be expected to account for their global emissions, not just those produced in the UK.

Carbon reporting may become mandatory by 6th April 2012 as part of the UK government’s commitment to reduce carbon emission levels by 80%, compared to 1990 levels, by 2050, in all sectors, including travel.

Question marks still hang over exactly how carbon reporting will operate. ‘A key decision is yet to be made about exactly which firms it will apply to,’ says Tom Beagent, assistant director at PricewaterhouseCooper’s (PwC).

But its main effect on companies who are told to comply is already obvious. ‘The main penalty for failing to report carbon emissions clearly and reliably will be a reputational one,’ says Beagant. ‘It will be the benchmark against which investors and customers judge a company’s seriousness in reducing their Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions.’

That matters because GHG emissions will soon come with a hefty price tag. The UK government is about to start effectively taxing companies for the carbon they produce.

The UK government’s Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme, a cap and trade scheme, is expected to become mandatory for all large organisations based in the UK in early 2011, according to the Confederation of British Industry.

Companies falling under the scheme will have to pay £12 per tonne of carbon emitted. ‘That figure could rise substantially in the future,’ says Beagent.

Levels of scrutiny and pressure to comply will be high. ‘Investors will demand robust and independent audits of reporting, asking if the management team are using the information to drive the business strategy, and performance improvement,’ says Alan McGill, a PwC partner.

‘Credible assurance standards will have to emerge because climate change and carbon emissions now have direct financial impacts,’ continues McGill.‘This is not about Corporate Social Responsibility or greenwashing. Companies will need robust systems and processes to gather the data, report on it, analyse it and use it to drive value into a business.’

Currently, while 65% of the world’s 500 biggest companies – responsible for 11% of global GHG emissions – have announced carbon reduction targets, only 19% have shown any actual reductions, according to PwC research.

Clearly, this will become an untenable position as schemes like the UK CRC, and the associated demand for carbon reporting, begin to bite.

But travel industry chiefs should resist the temptation to see it as a negative development. As Peter Young, chair of the Aldersgate Group, a coalition of businesses and individuals committed to promoting the economic benefits of sustainability, said earlier this year: ‘Carbon reporting is not a burden. It is about identifying cost savings and opportunities.’

Additionally, from 2012 onwards, aviation will be included in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, which means that all airlines will have to report their verified emissions data to their national governments using a standard measure. There is therefore no reason why airlines should not be transparent in reporting their average CO2 emissions per passenger carried, which would allow customers to make truly accurate comparisons between airlines’ efficiency.

46%of respondents admitted that they didn’t understand what sustainable tourism means


‘The main penalty for failing to report carbon emissions clearly and reliably will be a reputational one. It will be the benchmark against which investors and customers judge a company’s seriousness in reducing their Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions.’

Tom Beagant, assistant director, PricewaterhouseCooper

Stick-and-carrot travel

Hotels and resorts battling to comply with new eco-legislation, could be forced to introduce reward and incentive schemes in a bid to persuade reluctant travellers to accept carbon-cutting regimes in resorts and hotels.

Although the onus will be on tour operators to help consumers by managing the majority of their carbon footprint through the online and suppliers, operators might deploy carbon crusaders to monitor the carbon footprint of individual travellers, HotelTravel.com warned in its annual trend forecast in December 2009.

‘Travellers would accumulate ‘carrots’ for reducing their carbon footprint on holiday that could be redeemed for future eco-holiday treats,’ said a spokesperson.

The Hotel Room of tomorrow

However, these approaches will quickly become redundant as the very infrastructure of a hotel or resort changes to encourage a guest to adopt environmentally-sustainable behaviour – as our Hotel Room of the Future visualisation (page 21) demonstrates.

Projects such as the ‘Living Wall’ being developed by MIT Media Lab in Massachusetts indicate the way this technology is developing. Here, interactive wallpaper monitors its environment, controlling lighting, sound and electricity through touch, while General Electric’s online tool tracks the energy consumption of 53 electrically-powered home appliances and displays watts used and their equivalent in US dollars.

Our experts predict it will produce hotels and resorts with super-insulated walls and roofs, high-efficiency, polarising window panes, and a personalised, computer-controlled climate system that recognises a guest’s preferred optimum temperature, combining to ensure supreme comfort levels and minimal energy use from air conditioning or heating.

A hyper-efficient bathroom will include a Waterpebble device in the luxury-feel eco shower that flashes to indicate too-high water use, and a recycling loop that utilises excess ‘grey’ water from the sink and shower to flush the toilet.

Environmentally-unfriendly disposable plastic water bottles will be replaced by reuseable bottles that guests can fill with cold, filtered water from special taps both in their room and around the hotel or resort.

Electricity and heating will come courtesy of the hotel’s wind turbines and photo-voltaic solar panels, and guests will able to eat fresh fruit and vegetable direct from state-of-the-art greenhouses in the grounds, while relaxing on furniture upcycled and sourced from local craftspeople.

Much of the above already represents best practice, which will become increasingly ubiquitous going forward.


No-go destinations

World heritage sites such as Venice, Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu and the Great Pyramids are already under threat from sheer visitor numbers.

The advent of Last Chancers, holidaymakers rushing to see places such as the Everglades and Antarctica before they are destroyed by climate change and overdevelopment, and the success of Frommer’s recent book 500 Places To See Before They Disappear, suggests that drastic protective action may be necessary.

We take World Heritage sites for granted today,’ says Ian Pearson, futurologist and founder of Futurizon. ‘In the future we won’t be able to go wherever we want. There’ll be tourist levies on key locations and only the rich and famous will be able to afford a ticket.’

A Room With a View

Hotels that have grasped the sustainable travel baton and run with it include:

: The Klima Hotel, Bozen, Italy, designed by architect Matteo Thun and due to open in 2011, uses eco-friendly techniques such as a green roof to regulate internal temperature and keep energy use to a minimum. Its 11 units are so thoroughly integrated into an Italian hillside that visitors may find them hard to spot.

: Hotel Punta Islita, Costa Rica, raises £100,000 a year from its Contemporary Art Museum, visited by 60% of guests, and uses the money to fund a range of sustainable micro-enterprises including seafood processing plants, restaurants and cafés, shops, furniture workshops and tour operators.

: Turtle Bay Beach, Watamu National Marine Park, Kenya, stages a Saturday beach clean-up with a prize for the guest who collects the most detritus. Beach debris such as seaweed and driftwood is recycled, used to make original artwork, or to decorate and furnish the hotel itself. This includes furniture and cabinets made from wrecked dhow canoes and mosaics consisting of tiny squares of discarded flip-flops. The resort received a Gold Travelife award (ABTA’s sustainability rating system) for its commitment to the environment and local community.

: Soneva Fushi, The Maldives, contributes a carbon tax of 2% from every guest villa to offset the resort-related emissions, channelling money into the Six Senses Carbon Offset Fund, which finances wind turbines and sustainable community development in developing countries.

: Nihiwatu, a 14-room bamboo and thatch hotel in Sumba, Indonesia, is powered by coconut biodiesel and funds The Sumba Foundation, which has dug 44 wells to provide clean water to 15,000 people and established five health clinics for 18,000 patients, saving 53 children in the past year by providing free malaria medicine.

: The Ritz-Carlton chain’s Give Back Getaways programme offers guests the chance to spend half a day working on a range of social or environmental projects, such as helping to protect the El Yunque rainforests in San Juan, Puerto Rico, or engaging in music therapy courses for disabled children in Istanbul.


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Resort response

Faced with a sobering range of drivers and their consequences, the industry has already started to respond with innovative and inventive ways to turn mass tourism – and its main tool, the package holiday – into part of the solution.

Keycamp Parcs, a series of camping and chalet parks in Brittany and the Languedoc regions in France, have introduced a classic Nudge-style scheme to encourage low-carbon travel by offering families free bike hire for their stay if they arrive by train rather than plane.

Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, based in the US, has spotted the need to use engaging, fun strategies to guide guests towards sustainability with its Ecology Mixology – Have a Drink, Plant a Tree initiative, launched in September 2010. Under the scheme, a tree is planted in a Central American rainforest for every eco-friendly organic cocktail ordered by guests. Even the paper upon which the menu is printed is carbon-neutral, made from Green-e Certified and Forest Stewardship Council-certified materials and with an ‘eco tip’ to help educate guests about environmental issues on each page.

In Tenerife, a project developed by Instituto Tecnológico y de Energías Renovables has produced the world’s first bioclimatic holiday village. Here, 25 energy-self-sufficient houses have been built to act as a living experiment in sustainability. Each house runs on a different model and over time scientists will see which of them works best.

Aimed at bringing urban dwellers closer to nature, the Tree House hotel in Sweden – built, as the name suggests, in the trees – comprises four rooms: The Mirrorcube, The Bird’s Nest, The Cabin and The Blue Cone. Each room has an eco-friendly incineration toilet and a water-efficient hand basin, which means there is no artificial plumbing.

Turtle Bay Beach in Watamu, Kenya, offered by Thomson Holidays was recently voted one of the five best beaches in the world, but also runs a turtle protection programme and a weekly beach clean-up.

First Choice’s five-star Holiday Village in Rhodes is another indicator of the shape of things to come. Solar panels provide all hot water, while a combination of low-energy air conditioning and design features such as shading canopies, roof ventilation and super-insulation damp down energy demand. Water use is kept to a minimum by low-flow systems in bathrooms and public areas and irrigation of gardens by treated waste water.

URBN, a boutique hotel group in Shanghai, renovates existing structures with recycled and locally-sourced materials and launched China’s first carbon-neutral hotel. The group is working with Emissions Zero to calculate the total amount of energy the hotel consumes and offsets that by buying credits in local green-energy projects. Guests are also able to monitor their carbon usage while there and buy credits to offset that, along with flights.

98%The percentage by which the Committee on Climate Change says algae-based biofuels would reduce aircraft lifecycle GHG emissions by

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‘We take World Heritage sites for granted today. In the future we won’t be able to go wherever we want. There’ll be tourist levies on key locations and only the rich and famous will be able to afford a ticket.’

Ian Pearson, futurologist/founder, Futurizon


Water Shame

Only one in ten UK holidaymakers monitors their water and energy usage while on holiday and only 29% say this is something they would be willing to do more of over the next five years. These figure show the low awareness and need for more information that tourists require from travel operators. One of the most important initiatives is Travelife, an industry-wide environmental and social audit for hotels set up by ABTA that outlines key water saving initiatives and helps holidaygoers assess which hotels are greener and pay their staff fairly, for example.

Taking the lead in the UK, Thomson Holidays is the first operator to introduce design firm Priestmangoode’s Waterpebble into its hotel rooms, a device that sits in the shower monitoring water usage. The round, plastic device emits a red light when you’ve used too much water.

Water CHAMP, a water conservation hotel and motel programme encouraging guests in Florida to reuse towels and bed linen to reduce water usage, has registered a 96% approval rating.

It is an attitudinal shift that won’t be lost on the industry as decision-making at corporate and resort level takes into account the urgent need to conserve water in popular destinations made vulnerable to supply shortages by climate changes and more expensive transport costs.

The first indications can be seen in Marriott International’s recently-announced plans to invest $500,000 in seed money over the next two years to support a vital water conservation programme in Southwest China, while Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels throughout China are committed to reducing their water and energy use by 25% by 2017.

Another visionary example is Cortijada Los Gázquez, an ‘off-grid’ eco-guesthouse in the mountains of Andalucia, which produces 90% of its water from rainwater-harvesting technology and uses an elaborate natural reed bed system to recycle sewage to water its lush gardens.

Mass tourism will look to adapt water conservation models used by hotels such as the Soneva Fushi in the Maldives, where grey-water recycling and rainwater-harvesting technology and use of filtered sea water in swimming pools has drastically cut water use.

More subtly, resorts will realise that they cannot simply globalise their water use. ‘Ordering green beans grown in dry countries such as Kenya just won’t seem appealing any more,’ says Futurizon’s Ian Pearson.

Instead, they will produce more and more of their food on-site. The St Regis hotel in San Francisco, for example, cultivates its terrace garden to supply herbs, celery and fennel to the kitchen and for treatments in its spa. Dunkeld’s Royal Mail hotel in Australia sources most of its ingredients from owner Dan Hunter’s kitchen gardens.

As the industry responds in the medium term to increasingly tough eco-legislation and rising fuel costs by nudging its mass customer base towards sustainable attitudes to travel, our experts say we will see a range of trends encompassing traveller attitudes, resort planning and eco-technology.

Medium-term Trends (2010–2015)


Carbon Cashback

Programmes such as TUI Travel UK’s World Care Fund are an example of how holidaymakers can partly address the carbon emissions from their holiday. The fund helps tourists to contribute to carbon-reduction initiatives through investment in renewable energy in developing destinations. The money also funds community destination projects, some of which address environmental issues.

Our experts say that industry efforts will become more direct and proactive over the next five years, with the widespread introduction of carbon reward schemes such as the one at the Elan Inn in Hangzhou, China, where guests earn points that can be redeemed against hotel services for carbon-reduction measures such as keeping the air-conditioning at no less than 26°C in summer and heating at no more than 20°C in winter.

The Crowne Plaza in Amsterdam is offering free meals to guests who use specially-adapted gym equipment to generate electricity for the hotel, while Dutch design agency Tjep is working on the Oogst 1000 Wonderland hotel concept that imagines guests staying for free in return for working in hotel food production farms and being paid for using toilets linked to bio-gas energy systems.

Les Hayman, chairman of carbon management firm Carbon Guerrilla, believes holiday reward schemes will rapidly become part of a wider, whole-life CO2-saving initiative. Points earned at a resort will be recorded on a carbon credit card to be spent as currency once travellers return home. ‘You could buy your latte in Starbucks with your carbon credit card,’ he says.’

Tradecations

Our experts predict the increasing development and popularity of Tradecations or ‘fly-and-swap’ holidays where travellers spend time helping the local community and environment, or with a regional non-governmental organisation (NGO) in return for extra holiday perks.

The Mandarin Oriental hotel in Miami is an early adopter, helping to preserve the nearby Everglades National Park, a threatened UNESCO World Heritage site, by involving guests in tree-planting and invasive species removal programmes in return for access to limited-access walking trails in the park.

‘Our basic premise is that you can’t travel to a hotel and not notice the poverty outside the window,’ says John Dean, co-founder of GoPhilanthropic, a socially-conscious tour operator based in Rochester, New York. ‘Instead of handing out money or the wrong kind of gift, we work with local non-profit-making organisations or NGOs and support their efforts.’

About 20% of Americans have taken a volunteer holiday, while 62% of those who haven’t say they are ‘very likely’ or ‘somewhat likely’ to do so, according to a Condé Nast Traveler/MSNBC.com survey from last year. Meanwhile, 95% of those who have taken a Tradecation trip say they would be happy to do so again.

‘Travellers are looking for a sense of purpose in their leisure activities,’ says Brian Mullis, president of Sustainable Travel International. ‘They are looking at new ways to distribute wealth. The age of chequebook philanthropy is morphing into the age of participatory philanthropy.’

‘We’re in the middle of a revolution in tourism, and how it can play a part in this societal change,’ says Professor Geoffrey Lipman, special advisor to the secretary-general of the UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO). ‘The big things playing a fundamental part in that change are mindset, technology and financing.’

Professor Geoffrey Lipman, special advisor to the secretary-general, UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO)


Next-generation Aircraft

Earlier this month (November), 190 countries at the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) assembly signed a global agreement to improve aircraft engine efficiency by 2% a year until 2020. A new generation of aircraft such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner – 20% more fuel-efficient – will be vital in enabling the industry to hit those targets.

Of the people surveyed for this report, 22% said they plan to choose more fuel-efficient airlines. With websites such as responsibletravel.com offering customers online comparisons of airline carbon emission levels, they are now able to do so with ease.

Low Carbon Flight Search, an online tool launched by responsibletravel.com, produces a carbon-ranking league table of airlines flying a route league, where customers can enter their departure and destination details.

Airlines are ranked from 1–10 – with 1 being the most carbon-efficient for that specific route and 10 being the worst. ‘Carbon efficiency is a piece of information that our customers are starting to ask for,’ says press officer Krissy Roe. ‘This tool assesses a wide range of relevant statistics for each airline on each route to allow customers to factor in travel sustainability when they choose a holiday.’

This new wave of environmentally-sensitive Carbo-tourists will start to use this as one of their main criteria for choosing a holiday.

Mark Hodson, co-founder of sustainable ski-holiday website Snowcarbon.co.uk, includes tables comparing the amount of carbon emissions produced by travelling by air, rail and road to each of his featured resorts.

‘Increasingly, it’s what people want to make an informed decision,’ says Hodson. ‘They realise that it’s not enough to say they are doing their bit for a better environment by booking a sustainable holiday unless they’ve got facts and figures showing exactly how much better.

‘Soon travellers will expect every holiday to be completely transparent in terms of carbon emissions, in the same way that they now expect food to be labelled with fat and nutrient content.’

Jane Ashton, head of sustainable development for Thomson Holidays – due to be the first UK airline to take delivery of the Dreamliner in 2012 – said: ‘The ICAO agreement was a landmark on the road to carbon-neutral growth for the travel industry and increasingly fuel-efficient aircraft such as the 787 are how we will travel there.’

Responsible Traveller Technology

Kits containing a whole range of energy- and water-saving technology will be available or even presented to travellers as they arrive at their resort or hotel. ‘It’s not unimaginable that this could start happening within 10 years,’ says TUI’s Ashton.

Current examples are smart shower meters, iPhone good energy apps, the Waterpebble or David Weatherhead’s gadget that lets you know when you’ve showered for five minutes, the recommended time to ensure your ablutions are more water-efficient than a bath.

Your eco-friendly holiday pack could also include the new Soladey-J3X solar-powered electric toothbrush, available in early 2011, Nokia’s E-Cu mobile phone, recharged by body heat and the literal, but amusing Stop the Water While Using Me, a new line of beauty products, which reminds users to do just that in bold black letters on its packaging.

For trips that include a trekking or adventure element, there is the Bobble, a self-filtering recycled water bottle with an in-built charcoal filter that enables you to drink from any stream or pool, doing away with eco-unfriendly alternatives such as bottled water.


Responsible Travel Kit

A hi-tech selection of resource-saving gadgets that, soon, no self-respecting sustainable traveller will be without:

: The Waterpebble by Priestmangoode, a tiny meter that sits in a shower and sink plughole and glows red when too much water is used.

: Soladey’s new J3X solar-powered toothbrush, incorporating an ingenious feature that sends a stream of electrons into the mouth, reacting with chemicals in human saliva to clean away plaque and do away with the need for environmentally-unfriendly toothpaste.

: The solar-powered electric shaver, you simply leave out to recharge in the sun through an integrated solar panel.

: The Nokia E-Cu mobile phone can be charged using heat sources, including a radiator or even the human body, negating the need for an electricity-hungry charger.

: For adventure trippers, the Bobble, a self-filtering recycled water bottle with an in-built charcoal filter, allows you to drink from any stream or pool, doing away with non-sustainable alternatives such as bottled water.

: The Joon & Jung Paper Alarm Clock comes complete with a self-addressed envelope that lets the owner post it back to the manufacturers at the end of its life to be recycled to make new alarm clocks.

: Bendable rechargeable batteries, newly developed by Stanford University, are perfect for light holiday packing. They comprise a single sheet of paper coated on both sides with carbon nanotubes that can be recharged up to 300 times.

: The Bloom laptop computer, a cradle-to-cradle inspired masterpiece from Stanford University designed to be dismantled in just two minutes without tools for easy recycling.

: A new line of beauty products called Stop the Water While Using Me reminds users to do just that in bold black letters on its packaging.

‘Soon travellers will expect every holiday to be completely transparent in terms of carbon emissions, in the same way that they now expect food to be labelled with fat and nutrient content.’

Mark Hodson, co-founder, Snowcarbon.co.uk

ABOVE FROm TOp : BOBBLE wATER BOTTLE, BY kARim

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sTOp THE wATER wHiLE Using mE


Super-resorts, Hyper-holiday Hubs and Brownfield Travel Experiences

Rather than homogenised resorts that subsume the local culture and make us feel patronising and intrusive, a new generation of Imagined Villages will spring up, often reclaiming former urban or brownfield sites, consciously created as artificial spaces to enable us to escape from the real world.

Zira Island, a self-sustaining new project by Bjarke Ingels Group in Azerbaijan, is a good example. The fabricated island, built on what is industrial wasteland at the Caspian Sea, is a proposed resort and entertainment city of architecturally-created mountains.

Designers dbox go one step further with oil spill hotels, large-scale resorts built on the sites of former mines, oil spills and disused refineries, and designed to reverse environmental degradation, neutralising polluted water through stepped lime-stone filters to feed a lush, healthy environment. ‘A toxic wasteland no longer,’ said a dbox spokesman.

These first beginnings can be seen in the Songjiang Sustainable Hotel, near Shanghai, breathing new life into a former quarry.

Our experts are confident that cultural and technological innovation will ensure that no-one will talk about sustainable travel any longer by the 2020s. ‘In 20 years we won’t talk about eco-travelling any more. That will have been assumed and we’ll just be talking about travelling,’ says Ayesha Durgahee, of CNN Business Traveller. Societal absorption of the lessons of sustainability will spawn a series of new trends.

Medium to long-term Trends (2015–2025)

22%of the UK public said they plan to choose more fuel-efficient airlines in the next five years


Intermodal Hubs and Aerovilles

China has already doubled its budget for high-speed and electric rail projects from $44bn a year to $88bn a year. As rising fuel costs make conventional air travel more expensive, rail travel may replace domestic and intra-continental flights, predict Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl in their book Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil.

Many of the world’s largest airports will become aerovilles, destinations in their own right, with media-saturated interiors that include state-of-the-art cinemas, hotels and restaurants.

Travellers might stay for a day or more to work, relax, browse and shop before taking advantage of the airport’s other role as an intermodal hub linking road, rail and new forms of land transport with over-water and short-hop air travel between land masses. ‘In terms of international travel by air, we see the rates of growth moderating or even coming to a halt rather being cut back,’ says Perl.

‘In 2025, oil is going to be more expensive and more strategically directed,’ he adds. ‘In other words, it will be used for things such as air travel, where there is no replacement, rather than on land, where you can replace it with electricity, or on water where you can replace some of the oil that’s used by wind.’

Changi Airport, Singapore, which is staging an astonishing 2010 Christmas wonderland with whimsical trees and fantasy characters, and a magical teapot with hourly light displays in terminal 3’s departures lounge, is an early indication of this long-term trend.

Speed of travel will be the other attraction of the new intermodal hubs, as super-high-speed rail links connect cities faster than aircraft. Belgium’s new high-speed rail network is a taste of things to come. The network links Brussels to central Amsterdam in one hour and 53 minutes, to Cologne in one hour and 47 minutes, Paris is only one hour and 22 minutes away and London will be about two hours away, according to test runs by experts at Travelbite.com.

By comparison, a typical flight from London Heathrow to the centre of Brussels, including check-in and travel to the airport, takes between 3 and 3.5 hours, according to British Airways.

BELOw : zERO impAcT dEsTinATiOn, cOncEpT BY dBOx


Second-generation Biofuels

Finding a commercially-viable second-generation biofuel that doesn’t compete for scarce water resources or food production land in developing countries has become the holy grail for the aviation industry. As KLM chief Peter Hartman said in February this year: ‘Government, industry and society at large must now join forces to ensure that we quickly gain access to a continuous supply of biofuel.’

The financial incentives are huge. Sustainable Flying, a report on ‘sustainability economics’ published by UK consultancy EQ2 Insight earlier this year, unpacked potential cost savings for the European aviation industry based on the Air Transport Action Group’s assumption that biofuel use in aircraft would reach 15% by 2020 and 30% by 2030.

By avoiding 35m tonnes of C02 emissions in the former, the industry would save $2.01bn under the proposed rules of the EU’s Emission Trading Scheme.

Biofuel demonstration flights have already been conducted by Air New Zealand, Continental, Japan Airlines and KLM. ‘There is a long list of airlines who would like to do a biofuel flight,’ says Airbus senior vice-president of public affairs Rainer Ohler. ‘The problem is the availability of biofuel.’

Unsurprisingly, the race is on to solve this particular problem. Qatar Airways announced a joint project with airframe builders Airbus in January to draw up ‘a detailed engineering and implementation plan for economically-viable and sustainable biofuel production.’

Barely a week later, Boeing teamed up with Honeywell fuel technology subsidiary UOP, the Masdar Institute of Science & Technology and Eithad Airways to form The Sustainable Bioenergy Research Project in Abu Dhabi. It aims to explore the possibility of setting up seawater farms for growing mangrove forests and salt-tolerant salicornia as feedstock for commercial biofuel production.

Companies such as Finnish forestry and paper group UPM-Kymmene aim to produce 200,000 tonnes of biodiesel from 3m tonnes of forest waste, mainly bark, twigs and stumps, by 2012/2013.

Experts believe all this effort and ingenuity will produce major results. The Committee on Climate Change, the independent body that advises the UK government, predicted in its report Meeting the UK Aviation target – options for reducing emissions to 2050 earlier this year that biofuels will account for between 10-30% of aviation fuel use by 2050, cutting lifecycle Greenhouse Gas emissions for the industry by at least 50%.

Algae-based biofuels – which the Committee on Climate Change says would reduce aircraft lifecycle GHG emissions by 98% - are seen one of the most promising areas of research by industry insiders.

ExxonMobil disclosed plans in July 2009 to pour a $600 million investment into R&D work by biotech company Synthetic Genomics, vowing to lend engineering and scientific expertise ‘throughout the programme, from the development of systems to increase the scale of algae production through the manufacturing of finished fuels’.

Now leaders in the biofuel field like Jennifer Holmgren, general manager of the renewable energy and chemicals business unit at Honeywell fuel technology subsidiary UOP, are offering an optimistic 5-10 year time frame for commercial fuel production. ‘There’s a couple of people who may surprise us and come in a little bit under,’ she says.

‘Travellers are looking for a sense of purpose in their leisure activities. They are looking at new ways to distribute wealth. The age of chequebook philanthropy is morphing into the age of participatory philanthropy.’

Brian Mullis, president, Sustainable Travel International

OppOsiTE pAgE : HYdROgEnAsE AiRsHip, cOncEpT

BY VincEnT cALLEBAUT ARcHiTEcTUREs


Heritage Havens

Limiting tourist numbers to popular, but vulnerable attractions, is a thorny subject. UNESCO’s call for only 917 visitors per day to Machu Picchu has met solid resistance from the Peruvian government.

But our experts felt that, in the longer term, radical measures to balance visitor numbers with conservation needs were inevitable. Both Brad Templeton, director of futurist think tank The Foresight Institute, and author Leo Hickman have suggested that tickets to sites such as Machu Picchu will ultimately be decided by lottery systems.

‘It would completely change the whole idea of going there,’ says Hickman, ‘I’m confident that the UK holidaymaker will be able to savour these sites more if they realise how rare they really are.’

Futurologist Pearson believes that the choice of gatekeeper mechanism will be site-specific. ‘Environmentally-sensitive sites such as coral reefs will probably introduce carbon points systems that allow visitors to buy access by spending reward points they have accumulated by saving carbon elsewhere through efficient energy use at home or method of travel,’ he says.

‘A National Trust property might only allow access if you have arrived by train and can produce a ticket to prove it, whereas you might need to win a lottery for the right to pay a fee to visit places such as the Taj Mahal that will otherwise be swamped by the projected increase in mass tourism.’

Another possibility suggested by cutting-edge architects are state-of-the-art viewing platforms that will allow visitors to look at, and walk above, areas of pristine beauty or heritage sites, which have become too fragile to take the tramp of thousands of feet.

Aste architecture’s Top of Tyrol platform, balanced on the edge of the Mount Isidor glacier in the Tyrol, is a dramatic example. So is the stunning organic/minimalist sweep of the Ruta Del Peregrino lookout point in Mexico.

The New Visionaries

Ten imaginative and innovative new solutions for sustainable tourism

: The Concrete Mushrooms

Remnants of the Cold War are transformed into eco-friendly hotels, bars and cafés by postgraduate students Gyler Mydyti and Elian Stefa, in a concept that finds a new use for 750,000 empty Albanian military bunkers.

: Recycled Island

A portable island in the Pacific, created from floating plastic that litters the ocean, is the inventive concept by WHIM architecture.

: Saudi Biome Project

Bringing an oasis to the desert of Saudi Arabia, Philip Pauley’s latest concept is a giant bio-dome incorporating a rainforest, a 200ft waterfall and a hotel.

: H20 Hotel

A hotel that harnesses the power of H20 is a prototype by RAU and Powerhouse Company in Amsterdam, with water providing all the energy required.

: Aerotel

Suspended above water, the Aerotel is an eco-friendly concept by Alexander Asadov in which the ground floor is the sea and the first floor is the sky.

: Green Float

A city-sized carbon-neutral island powered by green energy is a concept under development by Japan’s Shimizu Corporation.

: Hydrogenase

A seaweed-powered self-sufficient airship for 2030 is the brainchild of Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut, which would refuel at biofuel-producing sea farms.

: STAR Island

STAR (Sustainable Terrain and Resources) Island, the world’s first carbon-neutral private island, is now in development in the Bahamas.

: Jingui Li

A green, livable tourism and residential development, where 90% of the 27-hectare site will be open green space, recently received city approval in Wuxi.


Solar Planes

Solar-powered concept aircraft such as the Solar Impulse, unveiled in the US last year, are still in their infancy. Although these concepts are far from being commercial aircraft, experts such as Templeton predict that passenger planes powered by the sun could be a reality by 2030.

‘We would need to double the battery technology that is around today,’ he says. ‘But people are optimistic about what we can do with batteries.’

Neurotravel

A trend for visiting a destination digitally without leaving your living room is already apparent. At Beyondspaceandtime.org, tourists can already visit a stunning virtual reality replica of China’s Forbidden City without trampling over the real thing.

Last year saw the launch of SynthTravels, the world’s first virtual travel agency, offering cyberspace holiday packages to users of the popular virtual universe, Second Life.

But, by the 2020s, technological and biotech advances will have made a virtual trip much closer to a real-world holiday experience. ‘We are already close to having a visual presentation that is indistinguishable from reality,’ says Cascio. ‘In 20 years that will be readily available and people will use these tools to feel like they are somewhere else.’

‘I think the next big thing will see IT meet biotech in a way that will allows us to pick up thoughts and sensations, to record and replay them,’ says futurologist Pearson. ‘I think we will get to the point where you can record holidays and play them back.’

Slowtopianism

A need to conserve expensive fuel and the emergence of a generation who believe the journey is as important as the destination will see a new golden age of airships and sailing boats.

Tino Schaedler’s futuristic Strato Cruiser, incorporating luxury cabins, a viewing platform, and a swimming pool inside a rigid superstructure and using newly-affordable helium for flotation rather than the inflammable hydrogen of old, is conceptualised floating over rainforests and barrier reefs.

Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut has designed Hydrogenase, a conceptual transport system that envisages airships constantly drifting the world, visiting oceanic farm hubs to collect passengers delivered by boat or short-haul aircraft and refill with biofuel produced from seaweed grown on-site.

Taking the lighter-than-air trend one step further, leading design and innovation company Seymourpowell has visualised a 265m-high vertical airship with stunning, cathedral-like internal spaces containing bars and lounges, restaurants and even apartments and penthouses.

At the same time, the SkyLifter is a project to develop disc-shaped airships capable of transporting zero-impact living modules into environmentally-sensitive wilderness areas without the noise and fuel-hungriness of a helicopter, and silently remove them again, leaving the landscape almost untouched.

BELOw : THE cLOUd, cOncEpT pROjEcT LEd BY cARLO RATTi


Aqua-villages

Already pioneered by STAR Island, the zero-impact resort being constructed off Eleuthera in the Bahamas, the concept of the floating resort that leaves no trace on its surrounding environment will become increasingly sophisticated.

Using emerging technologies, such as micro bio-turbines, and with recycled shipping containers as flotation foundations, aqua-villages will harvest sun, wind and rain, recycle and reduce waste, locally source all materials and ingredients, and can be dismantled and moved without trace. ‘These resorts are fully self-sufficient and have virtually no impact on their location, leaving life and nature untouched,’ say dbox designers, now working on a design for the first generation.

Sustainable Travel: Key Take-outs

1 : Lead the way – the travel industry must provide the infrastructure and incentives to guide a reluctant mass tourism base towards a new understanding of, and empathy for, sustainable travel.

2 : Smash the myths – public perceptions of what is and what is not a sustainable holiday are still confused and the industry needs to tackle that head on with a simple, clear communications strategy.

3 : Beyond boutiques – new mass resorts for the many, often on former brownfield sites, will meet the challenges of climate change, eco-legislation and an impending energy crisis far more effectively than high-end eco-lodges for the few.

4 : Carbon Reporting Standard – The Government and airlines need to collectively adopt an industry standard for carbon reporting that consumers will recognise. Airlines and travel companies need to report transparently and provide information to holidaymakers searching for carbon efficient airlines.

5 : Reward travellers with a heart – tourists want to be eco-angels and carbon reward schemes are the best way to keep them on the path to sustainability.

6 : Go slow – biofuels and fuel-efficient aircraft are the short- and medium-term answers to rising oil prices and carbon emission targets. But airships and sailing boats could be the key to long-term travel sustainability.

7 : Rail is the new air – a new generation of high-speed rail services linked to intercontinental airport hubs that double as leisure, work and shopping hotspots will usher in a new age of rail by the 2020s.

8 : Target zero – low-impact is no longer enough. By 2030, zero-impact travel involving floating islands that leave no environmental trace will be what the public demands.

‘I think the next big thing will see IT meet biotech in a way that will allows us to pick up thoughts and sensations, to record and replay them. I think we will get to the point where you can record holidays and play them back.’

Ian Pearson, futurologist/founder, Futurizon

07 12 2010 Thomson holidays susTainable holiday · PDF file · 2013-02-07THE ::...

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