Hazel McGuire, Intrepid Travel’s general manager UK and Ireland, believes there needs to be more alignment among businesses and other operators on how emissions are recorded to strengthen their industry’s response to the climate crisis and ensure apples are being compared with other apples.
Speaking at the Association of National Tourist Offices and Representatives’ (Antor) annual review this week, McGuire said businesses needed to measure their carbon footprint throughout their supply chains, but decried regulations she said that can often be at odds with one another depending on where a company is registered.
"For many companies ,there are a number of EU regulations that will come in place this year,” she said. “And the UK is looking at something completely different.”
To report their emissions, UK businesses need to adopt the Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) policy, which asks large companies to report their underlying global energy use and energy efficiency actions, among other things.
Businesses registered in Europe, meanwhile, need to abide by the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).
These take a broader approach by requiring companies to disclose not only their environmental but also their social and governance impact. “Having a unified measurement or tool would be super-useful for the industry as it would be able to compare apples with apples,” McGuire said.
McGuire has also called on the industry and government to work as one by sharing best practice, working with communities and holding stakeholders to account on measures designed to make travel more sustainable, such as the introduction of sustainable aviation fuels.
"Travel has such benefits in terms of connecting and bringing people together,” she added. “At the right level and done in the right way, tourism does good, as it creates jobs and brings money into [the destinations’ economies].”
Intrepid this week revealed it had achieved a higher B Corp score of 102.5 following its second recertification, going up from the 91.2 it scored in 2021.
