Setting an example

Our holidays are, by their very nature, ‘responsible’ and, consequently, they promote sustainable tourism:

• Many of our holidays take place in remote, rural areas where depopulation is a threat to the local economy. By holidaying in these regions, you help to bring employment and regeneration to these areas.

• Many of our walking routes help to keep open traditional drovers’ roads and other ancient paths.

• The hotels and taxi companies we use are, almost without exception, local and family-run businesses. The fact that our holidays are for individuals rather than groups also allows us to work in very quiet villages with small hotels and guesthouses offering as few as two or three rooms.

• We’re delighted that an increasing number of our customers are choosing to travel to their holidays by rail, taking the Eurostar from St Pancras. Improving and faster rail links mean that more places than ever are now within a day’s travel from London, and we offer a ‘by rail’ price option wherever you can reach a holiday comfortably in a day. For customers who fly, we organise transfers by train to the start of the holiday wherever possible, as well as offering advice on bus timetables where feasible.

• We encourage those customers who fly to offset the carbon emissions produced by their flights through Climate Care.

• To promote, and thereby help maintain, local cultures and traditions, we provide information on the history and gastronomy of the region you are visiting.

• Many of the hotels we work with feature local produce on their menus, something that we support. Many also have an environmental policy, relating for example to laundry, energy conservation, resource use etc, and we encourage this as much as possible.

We couldn’t ask anyone else to act responsibly if we weren’t doing so ourselves:

• Our offices, sympathetically converted from a disused farm building specifically for Inntravel, are very well insulated and use energy-efficient lighting.

•  We closely monitor heating and electricity usage in the office, as well as other resource-use such as paper, and we also encourage our staff to car-share, as our office is not served by public transport; around a third of our staff share transport on a regular basis.

• We use paper from sustainably managed forests, and the envelopes in which we mail our brochures from the office are made from recycled polythene and are themselves fully recyclable. Brochures sent from the mailing house are wrapped in recyclable paper.

• Our recyclable waste – paper, cardboard, plastics, batteries, cans and printer cartridges – is either sent directly for recycling, or distributed to local organisations and charities who benefit from recycling schemes. No waste from the office goes to landfill.

• We offset all our business air-travel emissions with a financial contribution to accredited organisations and projects that can make a real positive difference, and use a portion of the service fee to offset in a similar way the flights that we book for our customers.