The travel industry needs to stop expecting consumers to lead the change when it comes to sustainable travel. That was the message from easyJet holidays chief operating officer, Matt Callaghan, when he took to the stage at yesterday’s Abta Sustainable Travel Conference. Instead, he urged the industry to take ownership of sustainable travel, in the same way the coffee shop industry embraced the Fairtrade beans movement.
Callaghan asked delegates whether they had been offered an upsell to Fairtrade coffee that morning. “Why were we not offered it?” he asked. “Because they’ve already incorporated it!”
To back this up, he reported that in 2002, 10% of coffees sold in cafes and coffee shops were ethically sourced, and by 2012 that share had increased to 80%.
“That did not happen because we were banging our fists on the counter in Costa Coffee demanding ‘give us Fairtrade beans’. They grasped the mettle, because that was important to them as an industry.”
Callaghan said there was an industry assumption that travellers wanted more sustainable choices, but he argued that consumers shouldn’t need to choose between sustainable, affordable and good. “What percentage of customers take upselling opportunities? Very few,” he alleged. “Sustainability needs to be the default, something we don’t really think about, it’s just the way we operate.”
EasyJet holidays has just released its first Impact Report, outlining its commitment to making sustainable holidays more mainstream, and Callaghan admitted the process had not been easy: “You have to be quite vulnerable doing this, and big brands don’t do vulnerability very well.”
He called for pace over perfection, with education, collaboration and rapid implementation all needed simultaneously. “Leadership has to own the vision, so action becomes inevitable,” he said.
It is a fundamental shift in the way we do business, he said, declaring that the industry had to take ownership to “protect the magic of travel”.
“The places we call ‘destinations’, other people call ‘home’. And these conjure up very different feelings and emotions,” he said. “And when you see people on the news arguing that tourism is bad for their ‘home’, the time to act is now.”
