Sustainable Travel

Leilani C. Latimer
Director, Sustainability Initiatives
Travelocity, Sabre Holdings

A sustainable brand “sustains your brand promise over the long term,” Leilani Latimer told participants at Sustainable Brands ’09 in Monterey, California, adding that Travelocity’s brand promise is “to connect people with the world’s greatest travel possibilities.”

Travelocity’s effort to create a sustainable brand “is a story of grassroots cause marketing” that has helped the company differentiate itself in a largely commoditized market. It began when employees across the organization asked how they could make change happen. Their answer was to seek to “make the world better, one trip at a time.”

The company’s Travel for Good initiative includes a Change Ambassador program that awards 12 grants annually—three of them to employees—“to make volunteer travel wishes come true.” Latimer said many of the applicants had never traveled outside the United States before. Most had a history of community giving, were curious about other cultures, and were financially challenged.

Latimer told the story of one of the grant recipients, a mother who took her two sons to work at an orphanage in Costa Rica for two weeks. Her goal was to expose her children to people even less fortunate than they were but, when they returned, she said all her stereotypes about other countries had fallen apart. Though her sons did not speak a word of Spanish, they were able to interact with the local youth using the “international language of laughter, love, and humility.”

“Volunteering is a huge part of the fabric of who we are,” said Latimer. Employees are allotted six hours every quarter and the company is beginning to involve customers in its volunteer activities. For example, it invited attendees at a suppliers’ conference in New Orleans to help rebuild an elementary school. Latimer said these initiatives create a link between the culture, employees, and customers.

Travelocity was the first online travel company to offer customers the ability to purchase carbon offsets; and the program has offset more than 40,000 tons of carbon to date. The company’s website also provides green travel tips to encourage customers to travel more responsibly.

Research conducted in 2008 showed 66% of travelers think their choices can make a difference to the environment But many customers are skeptical about company claims, and only 8% said it was easy to find green options. In response, Travelocity published a listing of hotels that meet the Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria.

Latimer said environmental travelers often cite cost as a barrier to making a green choice, even though most suppliers have not raised their prices. “The perception that green costs more, even though it doesn’t, is something that we have to manage.” Last April, Travelocity launched a “Go Green for Less Green” program.

These programs are part of a wider culture of sustainability at Travelocity, Latimer told participants. For example, its headquarters was the second building in all of Texas to be certified under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program, and employees who start carpooling receive “wellness points” which they can use to get discounts on health care. She said practices differ for offices in different countries, and the company is working on trying to bring together best practices from each.

Operating in a highly commoditized space, where a customer will go to another site to save $5 on an air ticket, Travelocity uses its sustainability efforts to differentiate it from the competition. The company tries to make an emotional connection with its customers.

“Authenticity matters,” said Latimer. “I can’t repeat it enough.” If sustainability were not already embedded in the company culture, “it would have been hard to come forward with a program like this.”

In response to a participant’s question, Latimer said organizations must be prepared to constantly make a business case for cause marketing programs with the people who hold the purse strings. “Just because it was successful once, it doesn’t mean it will always be.”

Posted by BrianM at 7:27 AM | Permalink

The National Chamber of Ecotourism (CANAECO) and the National Fund for Forestry Financing (FONAFIFO) have announced a historic agreement that will allow Costa Rica to offer travelers the option of traveling to a carbon neutral destination. The agreement, announced during the First International Planet, People, Peace Conference in San Jose, Costa Rica, will have an initial contract period of three years.

The program, dubbed Climate Conscious Travel (CCT), is an agreement that has been exclusively designed by CANAECO and its distribution chain that will allow the tourism industry to share the costs of offering a carbon offsetting program to visitors while allowing tourism entities to assume responsibility of the industry’s CO2 production. Moreover, such programs will allow Costa Rica to more easily reach its carbon neutral goal of 2021.

With tourism being one of the main sources of income for Costa Rica, the effects of carbon emissions from the transportation industry, airlines in particular, have become of great concern for the country. Through this program, the industry will be helping to mitigate the nearly 6,723,000 tons of CO2 that is produced from the approximate 1.3 million visitors who arrive to Costa Rica every year.

Other projects supported by FONAFIFO were also highlighted during the First International Planet, People, Peace Conference, including a presentation of its work with Mapache Rent a Car, the country’s first carbon neutral rental car operator.

Costa Rica has long been considered a pioneer in environmental conservation since the creation of its National Parks System in 1977. By declaring 26% of its land as protected territory, Costa Rica has been able to develop one of the most intense biodiverse places on Earth which, today, accounts for approximately five percent of the Earth’s flora and fauna.

In 1997, as a response to its booming tourism, the Costa Rica Tourist Board designed the Certification for Sustainable Tourism (CST) program to assure a healthy growth of its tourism offering without taking away from its main attraction, its environmental beauty. Today, the CST program is considered to be one of the strictest certification programs in the world and includes more than 130 operators and growing.

Posted by BrianM at 10:22 AM | Permalink

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) - Brazil says it will voluntarily reduce carbon emissions by 36.1 percent to 38.9 percent by 2020.

Dilma Rousseff is chief of staff for President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. She says the cuts Brazil will present at a climate summit in Copenhagen next month will be on a voluntary basis only. She says the nation will not accept mandatory cuts.

Brazilian Environment Minister Carlos Minc has said the majority of Brazil's emission cuts will come from slowing deforestation, which scientists think is responsible for 20 percent of the globe's carbon emissions.

Rousseff announced the cuts Friday following a meeting with Silva and Minc.

On Thursday, Brazil announced that it had registered its biggest annual decline in deforestation.

(Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) - Brazil says it will voluntarily reduce carbon emissions by 36.1 percent to 38.9 percent by 2020.

Dilma Rousseff is chief of staff for President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. She says the cuts Brazil will present at a climate summit in Copenhagen next month will be on a voluntary basis only. She says the nation will not accept mandatory cuts.

Brazilian Environment Minister Carlos Minc has said the majority of Brazil's emission cuts will come from slowing deforestation, which scientists think is responsible for 20 percent of the globe's carbon emissions.

Rousseff announced the cuts Friday following a meeting with Silva and Minc.

On Thursday, Brazil announced that it had registered its biggest annual decline in deforestation.

Posted by BrianM at 10:17 AM | Permalink

LEED® Certified Hotel Prototype Will Reduce Costs and Enhance Speed to Market

Marriott International, Inc. announced today that it will expand its green hotel portfolio ten-fold over the next five years by introducing a green hotel prototype that will be pre-certified LEED® (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), an internationally recognized green building certification system designed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). The green hotel prototype, which will be available in April 2010, will save owners approximately $100,000 and six months in design time, and reduce a hotel’s energy and water consumption by up to 25 percent, based on national averages. These savings, combined with incentives offered in many jurisdictions, could provide a payback for the LEED building investment in about two years.

The green hotel prototype, referred to by the USGBC as “volume build certification,” has been created for Marriott’s Courtyard brand, which has a development pipeline of nearly 160 hotels worldwide. In 2010, the company expects to introduce similar green hotel prototypes for its Fairfield Inn, Residence Inn, SpringHill Suites and TownePlace Suites brands, which represent more than 290 hotels in the pipeline worldwide.

“Marriott's’ commitment makes it among the first in the world to commit to implementing green buildings on this scale,” said Doug Gatlin, Vice President, USGBC. Marriott was the first hospitality member of the USGBC, and has more than 20 LEED accredited professionals on staff.

While many of the benefits of LEED certification, such as improved energy savings, better indoor air quality and reduced CO2 emissions, are transparent to guests, others are easier to identify such as easy access to public transportation, in-room recycling, and light sensors in the guest rooms. These features are becoming even more important to travelers, who said that supporting environmentally-responsible travel service suppliers is a necessity, even in an economic downturn, according to the U.S. Travel Association and Ypartnership.

“The green hotel prototype gives Marriott a competitive edge with guests who prefer a green hotel experience, and with the growing number of owners and franchisees who want to provide it,” said Arne Sorenson, Marriott’s President and Chief Operating Officer at the USGBC’s annual Green Build conference in Phoenix today.
The Courtyard Settler’s Ridge in Pittsburgh, Penn., scheduled to open in the summer of 2010, will be the first to be built based on the new green hotel prototype concept. “We are very excited to have collaborated with Marriott on this significant initiative to help mold the Courtyard brand to be green for the future. We are committed to green building designs which are now being incorporated at different levels in every building we develop. We expect to build many more LEED-certified hotels using this prototype in the future,” said Mark Laport, president and CEO, Concord Hospitality.

Marriott already has 50 hotels registered for LEED, with 15 open or set to open by the end of 2010. The Inn & Conference Center by Marriott at the University of Maryland in College Park was the first LEED hotel in North America, and Marriott’s recently opened Portland Courtyard City Center in Oregon was just awarded LEED-Gold status. Other green hotels are planned in the Caribbean and Latin America, in partnership with CaribeHospitality. As a benchmark, there are only 31 LEED-certified hotels across the entire U.S. lodging industry.

Building on more than 20 years of energy conservation experience, Marriott is committed to protecting the environment. The company’s Spirit To Preserve environmental strategy calls for: Greening its $10 billion supply chain; further reducing fuel and water consumption by 25 percent per available room; creating green construction standards for hotel developers to achieve LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council; educating and inspiring employees and guests to support the environment; and helping protect the rainforest. Earlier this year, Marriott invited guests to add to the company’s $2 million commitment to help save the rainforest in Brazil. More information is available at www.marriott.com/savetherainforest or www.marriott.com/green-brazilian-rainforest.mi.

Marriott was recently ranked one of Newsweek's "The Greenest Big Companies," and has been recognized for its environmental leadership in the hotel industry by several groups, including Ceres, an alliance of investors and environmentalists; the non-profit organization ClimateCounts.org; and Travel + Leisure magazine. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency honored Marriott with its Sustained Excellence Award for the third straight year, and has awarded its ENERGY STAR® label to approximately 275 Marriott hotels.

Posted by BrianM at 5:41 PM | Permalink

According to a leading climate scientist, recent studies have shown the net warming effect of aviation induced cloudiness (AIC) is far larger, up to 30 times more, than had previously been thought and immediate attention should be given to mitigate the impact. Professor Ulrich Schumann, Head of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), said more focus should be placed on reducing aircraft contrails through improved air traffic management and better weather forecasting. Depending on temperature and humidity, contrails occur inside thin cirrus in the upper troposphere, which is the cruising altitude of most aircraft. By adjusting the flight level, more than 50 percent of contrails could be avoided, said Prof Schumann.

Despite considerable scientific progress in predicting the climate impact of aviation, major uncertainties remain, in particular with respect to contrail cirrus. The range of radiative forcing from aviation induced contrails scatter by a factor of larger than 10. However, the understanding has improved significantly over the past two years.

Contrail and cirrus formation is a highly non-linear process and depends strongly on the scale transition from the plumes emanating from an aircraft’s engines with fresh soot and young contrails into spread cirrus layers. Early studies concentrated on line-shaped contrails, but contrails develop dynamically into cirrus in time-scales of hours during which the line-shaped structure is lost. This scale transition lacked a model that would follow the history of all contrails from the global fleet of aircraft from origin shortly after engine exit until the end of their lifespan.

Schumann and his team have now developed a new Contrail Cirrus Prediction Tool (CoCiP) that can simulate contrail cirrus resulting from a single flight as well as from a fleet of cruising aircraft, flight by flight, regionally or globally. The method predicts contrail cirrus for given air traffic and weather prediction data and describes the life-cycle of each contrail individually.

Contrails are initiated when the ambient atmosphere is humid enough to allow for contrail persistence and the initial plume properties reflect the properties of the originating aircraft. The evolution of individual contrails of cruising aircraft can then be computed using wind, temperature, humidity and ice water content from numerical weather prediction (NWP) output. Radiative cloud forcing can be estimated for the sum of all contrails using radiative fluxes (the amount of energy moving a certain distance from the source in a unit of time) without contrails from NWP output.

So far, CoCiP has been tested in parameter studies in comparison with in-situ, lidar (technology that can measure a diffuse object such as a smoke plume or clouds) and satellite data. The model will next be used for a global evaluation of contrail cirrus radiative forcing and in the future it may be coupled to other global models (with aerosols and chemistry) to assess the total aviation climate impact.

Prof Schumann said the evidence had been collected over two years. “We haven’t published it yet because we want to complete a global assessment and we are waiting right now for input data from Eurocontrol,” he told GreenAir Online at this week’s Greener by Design conference ‘Aviation Faces up to Climate Change’. “However, we do have satellite observations of cloud changes and models to explain in detail what we observe. Altogether, this tells us that the climate impact of aviation is larger than assessed so far.”

Although the impact of CO2 was larger in the longer term, say up to 100 years, the effects of aviation-induced cloudiness had a much stronger impact than CO2 in the short to medium term, even up to the 50-year mark, he said. Even though the largest concentrations of AIC were in Europe and the US at present, the effects are much wider.

Like other leading climate scientists, Prof Schumann is against using a multiplier on CO2 emissions to take account of the impact of non-CO2 effects like contrail cirrus but believes a suitable metric can be found.

Adjusting the flight levels of cruising aircraft to avoid causing contrails can lead to an aircraft flying at a less than optimum fuel performance and so lead to higher emissions of CO2. However, Prof Schumann believes the procedure would provide better and immediate climate gains.

Link: German Aerospace Centre (DLR) - Institute of Atmospheric Physics - CoCiP

Source: Greener Air Online

Posted by BrianM at 7:41 AM | Permalink