Green travel: Did many travellers care in the first place?

Less coverage of green travel in travel media

You don’t hear quite so much about green travel these days, do you? For a good few years, it was the flavour of the month in the travel media. Far too much attention was devoted to travelling without flying, environmentally-friendly hotels, carbon off-setting and other ‘innovations’ that would give George Monbiot a vague feeling of sexual excitement. But why? Well I have a few theories…

ONE: The gimmick is tired

With wall-to-wall coverage of green travel in the newspapers and travel magazines, it was inevitable that it would get boring before long. Personally, I think it got boring not long after it started, but the gimmicks clearly had legs. But, alas, it no longer seems flavour of the month any more.

TWO: The Global Financial Crisis

The new flavour of the month, of course, is that nobody has any money. We’re continually told this, despite reams of evidence to the contrary. And now the spin on domestic holidays (I refuse to call them staycations) is that they’re cheap, rather than they’re green.

People have always taken domestic holidays in large numbers, and the travel media have always covered domestic holidays because of this. I can never quite understand why the travel media feels a need to attribute a reason to something that has always happened and always will happen.

THREE: Nobody cared all that much in the first place

I don’t doubt that there are people who are quite happy to travel to the Canary Islands by train and ferry, or go overland to Turkey. But they are in a tiny, freakish minority.

I suspect most holidaymakers out there are rather like myself – green when convenient. They’re the sort that will happily recycle when given a recycling bin to put things in, but won’t go out of their way to walk a sack of rubbish over to a recycling depot.

They’re happy to take public transport rather than drive, but not if it takes twice the time, involves two changes and costs twice as much.

They’re happy to switch to fluorescent rather than incandescent light bulbs, they’ll buy organic food if it’s not too much more expensive and will carry litter out with them rather than dump it in a National Park.

In other words, if it’s not going to be a monumental pain in the arse, they’ll take the greener option.

For my silent majority, roughly the same ethos applies to holidays. If price, facilities, location, comfort, timing and quality are roughly equal, they will probably go for the greenest of the two options presented.

How important is environmental friendliness?

But “is it environmentally friendly?” is a long way down the list of key questions. And despite the frenetic media coverage of anything that could feasibly link “green” and “travel” together, I suspect this has always been the case.

It’s no secret that many green credentials are about PR and getting media coverage rather than attracting punters directly. Now that budget is the new green, most of the PR stunts are about saving money and quirky special offers rather than solar heating, on-site windmills and carbon neutral guarantees.

The real reason that green travel doesn’t seem quite as big in 2009 is that it was never that big in the first place. The coverage was simply disproportionate; most travellers go the green way when convenient, rather than as a priority.

Do you agree? Was the green travel coverage disproportionate? How important is environmental friendliness to the average holidaymaker? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

Tags: ferry, green travel, marketing, media, PR, train travel, Transport, travel media, Travel Writing