Skift Travel News Blog

Adventure travel specialist G Adventures has made a “significant financial investment” in Reforest, a digital platform that connects travelers with local communities that are restoring their ecosystems using reforestation.

Reforest, which is based in Brisbane, Australia, said it enables travelers to give back by having their own trees planted in places where community tourism relies heavily on the preservation of the local environment.

The platform then provides travelers with tangible, visible, scientific data measuring the positive impact of the trees planted on their behalf — including drone-based footage and satellite imagery.

“I’ve never been a fan of carbon-offsetting,” said Bruce Poon Tip, founder of G Adventures, who recently spoke at Skift Global Forum in New York. “The idea that you can have a negative impact in one place and do something positive somewhere else, and that somehow balances the scale, is not science to me, and most of all it doesn’t change people’s behaviour.”

The stake G Adventures has taken not been disclosed but Daniel Walsh, Reforest’s co-founder, said the investment gave the company the means to improve its technology, and expand its offering by marketing the platform more widely within the global travel industry.

“Together we will also create a showcase example of restorative tourism at work as we build the G Adventures’ tree-planting programme together over the coming month,” he said in a statement.

Saudi Arabia’s national flag carrier Saudia announced on Wednesday that it has signed an agreement with German air taxi startup Lilium to purchase 100 jets.

With this purchase Saudia intends to launch new electric point-to-point connections as well as seamless feeder connections to Saudia’s hubs for business class guests, the airline said in a release.

Saudia also expects to support Lilium with the necessary regulatory approval processes in Saudi Arabia for certification of the Lilium jet.

With this Saudia will be the first airline in the Middle East and North Africa region to develop the all-electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) network in the region. The agreement will also help Lilium gain a foothold in the region.

The agreement with Lilium will contribute effectively to spurring sustainable tourism in Saudi using zero-emission aviation, said Ibrahim S Koshy, CEO of Saudia.

“Saudia intends to meet a growing demand for regional air mobility and offer guests a superior on-board experience. The potential for such an airborne transit network is limitless,” Koshy said.

While no timeline has been mentioned for the Saudia order, Lilium’s air taxi is scheduled to enter service in 2025, with production beginning as early as next year.

With orders worth approximately $2 billion, Lilium has already signed deals with Brazilian airline Azul, private jet company NetJets, as well as private jet company Globeair.

Expedia Group announced the launch of a startup accelerator to empower innovation on its business to business platform.

Selected startups — and small businesses, as well — would get technology and business development support, mentorship from Expedia Group personnel as well as outside experts, a non-equity grant, and access to the Expedia Group platform and products.

Companies can apply to the Open World Accelerator program by October 21 here. To qualify they must be striving to make the travel industry “more open and accessible,” be less than a decade old, and already have at least a minimum viable product.

Archana Arunkumar, Senior Vice President of Platform. “Expedia Group’s mission is to power travel for everyone, everywhere,” said Archana Arunkumar, Expedia Group’s senior vice president of platform in a statement. “Open World Accelerator is specifically designed to drive innovation in the industry, remove barriers to travel, and enable startups and SMBs to build capabilities on Expedia’s Open World™ technology platform that significantly improve the experience for every traveler.”

Former Kayak Europe leader and now travel investor Jan Valentin has joined Seatfrog‘s board of directors, as the rail startup looks to move on from the pandemic by tapping into the trend for more sustainable travel.

The app, which lets train travelers upgrade their ticket at a reduced rate on the original cost by bidding, was named a Skift Top Travel Startup to Watch in 2019. Then the pandemic hit, and it lost 97 percent of its revenue.

Now the company wants to put coronavirus behind it with the appointment of Valentin, who used to be Kayak’s managing director and senior vice president in Europe. Valentin also runs ennea capital partners, which in 2020 merged with Howzat Partners to create a new $100 million fund to invest in travel startups and other digital businesses.

Howzat also invested in Seatfrog’s $1.2 million seed round, but Skift understands no extra investment accompanied Valentin’s appointment to the board.

Valentin is also a backer of Comtravo, the German corporate travel agency that was recently bought by TripActions.

Seatfrog said in a statement Valentin joins at a perfect time to support the company’s mission to reimagine the rail experience in a category that has been “trundling along without meaningful innovation for decades.”

“Governments are spending $400 billion plus in Europe to drive modal shift to more sustainable train travel, but it remains a massively under-digitized category, and the customer experience is a mess,” he said.

Seatfrog said it had recorded 1,400 percent growth so far this year, and is expanding internationally.

“We’ve delighted millions of passengers, and driven large revenue uplifts for rail companies well beyond the capabilities of the category’s legacy systems,” added Iain Griffin, CEO and co-founder of Seatfrog.

New Zealand may be getting an official name change in our lifetime. The New Zealand Parliament might change the country’s name to Aotearoa, which is Māori for “long white cloud,” and restore cities and towns to their original Māori names.

Shedding the island’s colonial names could sustainably boost its tourism industry. When historically marginalized communities reclaim leadership of their lands, destinations often realize substantial benefits, which can include new marketing opportunities, improved destination management, higher visitor numbers and a better experience for visitors and residents. 

The discussion to change the country’s names kicked off when the Māori Party launched a petition to officially rename the country Aotearoa last year. The petition also called on Parliament to begin a collaborative process to officially restore the original Māori names for all towns, cities and places across the country by 2026.

The petition has collected more than 70,000 signatures and will be considered by a parliamentary committee that could recommend a vote in Parliament, put it to a nationwide referendum or not take action.

A significant share of the public desires some change to the country’s name. Over 40 percent said they want to replace it with Aotearoa or include Aotearoa in the official name, while nearly 60 percent want to keep the name, according to a 2021 1News Colmar Brunton poll.

Exploring the Future of Sustainability Across Travel

Watch highlights from this year’s Sustainable Tourism Summit.

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More than 100 travel industry stakeholders on Tuesday signed a letter to Congress urging them to prioritize passing clean energy tax credits and deductions. The letter was spearheaded by the U.S. Travel Association.

The letter urged the passage of tax incentives to expand sustainable aviation fuel production, electric vehicle charging station installations, clean energy technologies and energy efficiency upgrades to commercial buildings. It also called for strong federal investments to protect and restore natural attractions.

“Travel businesses and organizations of all sizes—from airlines and hotels to airports and attractions—are already taking steps to reduce waste, lower emissions, protect natural environments, and switch to more sustainable sourcing,” the letter said. “However, to accelerate and enable greater investment in this area, we need greater support at the federal level.”

On Tuesday, the USTA also launched the Sustainable Travel Coalition, which will advise USTA on sustainability issues and concerns within member organizations and destinations. As of the launch, the coalition has nearly 60 organizations,

SITA, a global technology provider for the aviation industry, has raised $400 million in so-called green financing.

As Skift described in its 2022 Megatrends report, green financing is an emerging trend where investments are made in companies that support or provide planet-friendly practices or products.

Four new banks have now signed up to support SITA with a sustainability-linked revolving credit facility, which has a minimum three-year term, the company said on Thursday.

The new funds will be directly linked to pre-agreed environmental key performance indicators and yearly targets, with a bonus (or penalty charge) on the interest margin depending on SITA’s performance. Performance against the targets will be externally audited.

The cash will go towards supporting the company’s general business needs, “such as developing new solutions and strategies to alleviate the air transport industry’s challenges of today and in the future,” it said in the statement.

SITA said it had ramped up its emission reduction efforts in recent years, achieving carbon neutral status under The CarbonNeutral Protocol in 2021. More recently it announced its commitment to setting science-based targets via the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) to join other leading companies to combat climate change aligned to net-zero and the 1.5C scenario of the Paris Agreement.

SITA’s five existing banking partners also participated in the raise.

“Sustainability is high on our agenda and we are deeply committed to ensuring a sustainable future for all, including for our employees, customers, and partners,” said Nicolas Husson, SITA’s chief financial officer. “We are delighted to secure financing that is directly linked to the performance of our sustainability ambitions.”

Speaking at Skift’s Sustainable Tourism Summit at the end of June, Intrepid’s chairman revealed that the tour operator recently received a large investment from a family-owned private equity firm because of its sustainability stance.

Saudi Arabia is also aiming to prop up its Red Sea tourism project with an up to $2.7 billion loan in green financing.

During the pandemic, SITA’s CEO said the tech provider had weathered the storm. but the private company will undoubtedly have been impacted by poor performances from its airports and airline customers as the pandemic continued to hammer travel.

“We contained our fall in revenue to -27% for the year, at $1.34 billion, compared to the previous year’s $1.8 billion,” said Barbara Dalibard in her 2020 report. “In reacting quickly to the crisis, we decreased our cost base in 2020 by 18 percent versus prior year, while reducing external support by 50 percent.”

It also achieved $300 million in cost reductions.

SITA was formerly known as Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques, and was founded by 11 airlines more than a decade ago. The company’s board includes executives from several airlines.

Although a rising number of consumers have expressed a desire to travel more sustainably in recent years, one travel executive believes guilt is not an appropriate emotion when thinking fossil fuels emitted while traveling.

Michel Gelobter, a sustainability expert and CEO Cooler, said — during a discussed tilted “The Business Advantage of Sustainability” — at Skift Sustainable Tourism Summit on Wednesday that while reducing the use of fossil fuels would help improve travel, travelers shouldn’t bear the responsibility for making that happen.

“The people who really have to change are the ones emitting fossil fuels directly,” Gelobter said. “Radisson doesn’t have control over the smoke stacks (and) the power of their hotels.”

But Gelobter urged consumers to push suppliers, supply chains and policy makers to drive fossil fuels out of the market and run on clean energy.

“If you turn off your house in a good way, many forms of travel actually (have a) lower footprint than staying home, depending on where you live.”

Tourism businesses engaging with local communities need to treat their hosts respectfully.

That’s the message that Judy Kepher-Gona, a sustainability consultant and founder of Kenya-based Sustainable Travel & Tourism Agenda, conveyed during Skift Sustainable Tourism Summit on Wednesday.

Kepher-Gona told Skift Editor-at-Large Lebawit Lily Girma — in a discussion titled “Putting Communities at the Center of Tourism” — that good tourism businesses reached out to local communities during the heart of the pandemic, citing successful examples she saw in Kenya of companies negotiating business dues with communities.

“All this thinking and narrative that communities don’t understand tourism …. its vulnerability and … complexity was demystified,” Kepher-Gona said. “Because they sat around the table and said, ‘Yes, we understand what Covid has done for the industry.'”

But although Kepher-Gona believes host communities are willing to engage with tourism businesses, she still sees a lot of disrespect toward local citizens.

“Most of the time, they are excluded in the conversation because it is thought they don’t understand a lot of things,” Kepher-Gona said.

The chairman and co-founder of Intrepid Travel has said there was too much “rhetorical flourish” from travel companies when it comes to discussing sustainability.

Speaking at the Skift Sustainable Tourism Summit on Wednesday, Darrell Wade bemoaned how organizations were touting a “build back better” ethos, while failing to take action.

“It’s disappointing, embedded into marketing, or even worse the boardroom,” he said during the online event.

“Half of the companies, probably more, will have done nothing. At the World Travel & Tourism Council, a good number of companies are talking the right way, and committing, but not enough are putting the rubber on the road.”

While some companies had managed to go beyond what he described rhetorical flourish, he said travel companies needed to ensure there was”company engagement” from the top, and they needed to commit measurable action, including science based targets. “You need to sign up to have that line in the sand,” Wade told moderator Rafat Ali, Skift CEO and co-founder.

“Sustainability is not easy, it’s heavy lifting. Even one aspect like climate change, to work out a pathway to zero emissions, is a lot of work,” he added.

Tour operators like Intrepid are at the forefront of the sustainability movement, Wade argued, because they are, in a physical sense, on the ground and dealing with locals, going face to face with communities.

“We’re often in remote areas, and that’s one of the reasons we go there,” he said. “It takes something climate change, and not a lot of imagination, to realize destinations will be impacted by climate change, before the New Yorks and Shanghais of the word,”

And overall he said that tour operators, including Intrepid, still have a long way to go, as they still emit a lot of carbon emissions.

By failing to take action, operators could end up alienating a public who are demonstrating intent to travel greener. Travel could become the new oil, Wade suggested, if tourists started saying “I’m not going to get in a plane.”

“It’s the role of every CEO, and staff member to start banging the drum,” he added.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article described Wade as CEO.