The first is that the growth we are seeing in sustainable travel will only accelerate. Despite the cost of living crisis and other global uncertainties, Intrepid Travel experienced its best global sales day in history on 22 November.

Yes, that’s right – we sold more trips in a single day in 2022 than we have on any other day in our 33-year history. And we’re not the only ones – sustainable travel is growing fast.

For 2023, we have more than 900 multi-day itineraries on offer, many of which are low-impact walking and cycling itineraries, entire ranges of new, closer-to-home adventures, and more trips featuring community-led or not-for- profit experiences than ever before.

Sustainable travel has accelerated way beyond what we forecast before Covid, and I predict it will only continue to grow in the year ahead.

The second is that it will be our purpose that helps us attract top talent.

Record sales days are good news for business, but it has been a huge challenge for our team. We know travel faced hurdles scaling up, which wasn’t helped by the competitive global jobs market. This made it exceptionally tough to recruit.

In the past year alone, we’ve advertised for more than 500 roles globally and about a third of our global team is either new or has been rehired to the company.

Scaling up and inducting new starters into a company at this pace is not easy. But I know that being a certified B Corp has helped give us an edge in our ability to attract brilliant people – because new hires tell us that all the time.

They tell us they wanted to work for a B Corp because they know we’ve done the work on our environmental and social standards, and that we are required to keep improving.

This, in turn, makes for more positive workplaces, stronger cultures and better businesses. That’s why I predict even more companies will join the B Corp community in 2023 – because it simply makes great business sense.

My third and final prediction is that any “action” on carbon, unless it’s decarbonisation, is likely to be greenwashing.

Unfortunately, one area where the new year doesn’t mean a fresh start is with the state of our planet. The science is clear – on our current trajectory, the world is on track for a 2.7C increase in temperature. No amount of tree planting or corporate sponsorships of climate change events is going to alter that.

Unless a business is measuring and reporting on its environmental impact – and then actively decarbonising – it is greenwashing.

We report on our science-based carbon emissions targets each year in our annual report, and we’d like to see many more travel businesses joining the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) in 2023.

And if travel doesn’t do the hard yards by itself, I predict that in the years ahead, we may find that more regulators and governments eventually step in to compel us to, whether we like it or not.

So as you set your new year goals, be sure to put sustainability, transparency and accountability in the plan – because that’s good business.

James Thornton is chief executive of Intrepid Travel.