At TourRadar, we want to make it easy for people to travel responsibly. We endeavour to ensure that sustainably organised adventures have a positive impact on people and the planet. We strive to connect people to life-enriching adventures while helping protect the planet. We believe that travel is a superpower that, when wielded correctly, can have long-term positive economic and social impacts on a destination’s people and natural environment.
Our Adventure Booking Platform (ABP) connects operators to travellers, travel advisors and other partners through our proprietary technology. Using our platform, everyone in the ecosystem can search, learn, communicate, book, and manage travel online – seamlessly, simply, and securely. Bringing together 2,500+ operators and over 1 million monthly travellers, nothing comes close to TourRadar when it comes to empowering people to benefit from adventuring.
The size and scope of our platform means we have the opportunity to create and nurture a community and ecosystem around shared values and goals whilst promoting what our partners are doing and raising awareness about sustainable travel among our customers.
By leveraging our position at the centre of the ABP ecosystem, we can educate and drive sustainability initiatives and rebuild travel in a better way
Travis Pittman, CEO
A key part of our sustainability plan is to be a source for customers to learn more about our operator’s sustainability initiatives. The operators on our platform have various levels of sustainability practices in place and this helps customers make informed choices when looking for organised adventures. We will showcase how tour operators incorporate sustainability into their itineraries, allowing our customers to understand the impact of their travels. We want our customers to choose organised adventures that are operated by locally led or owned companies with animal welfare guidelines, initiatives to reduce carbon emissions and that support community development and environmental projects.
Another key part of our sustainability plan is to support and encourage operators to run sustainably organised adventures. By embracing social responsibility, they can drive social and environmental innovation to make our world more sustainable for generations to come.
For most operators on our platform, efficient measurement of their emissions is unattainable. Our goal is to make it much easier for operators to approximate their footprint (“good enough”) at an “organised adventure” level. This will allow them to focus more energy and efforts on reducing and mitigating that footprint. In 2023, we will start to collect available data on carbon emissions in the organised adventure sector from our operators. Together with our partners, we are aiming to build an impact measurement tool that provides a simple and centralised way of carbon measurement and reporting for operators and their suppliers. With the impact measurement tool, we want to support operators and industry supply chains to focus more energy on decarbonizing their tours, adventures and operations by implementing this tool to the TourRadar Operator Dashboard as an open-source solution.
Due to our unique position at the centre of our ecosystem, one of our main and most achievable purposes is to bring the industry together to work on collaborative solutions to the climate crisis challenges. We believe that by working together with various stakeholders, and even competitors, we can have a more meaningful outcome that can benefit our planet and everyone in the industry.
Last year, our annual Adventure Together event was a kick-off for such collaboration with our “exclusive sustainability roundtable.” We met with key sustainability stakeholders of the multi-day tour industry – The Travel Foundation; Intrepid; The Travel Corporation; Planeterra; Visit Finland; TruTravels; and Klevr Places to discuss the main barriers to the organised adventures sector in engaging with the climate agenda, creating shared goals, fostering multi-level partnerships, and defining opportunities and strategies for collective actions that can be taken forward.
The measurement and decarbonisation of Scope 3 emissions as the reporting on emissions are considerable pain points to our sector. For many of our partners, most CO2 emissions and cost reduction opportunities are outside of their area of control.
Currently, our sector has no centralised, standardised hub or tool to measure or report CO2 emissions. As the first collaborative action, several pioneering operators have offered to share their measurement data to help TourRadar build an impact measurement tool that suppliers could use to measure and report their carbon footprint. By measuring Scope 3 emissions, organisations can determine the emissions hotspots in their supply chains, identify which of their suppliers are frontrunners and which are behind in terms of sustainability, and involve their suppliers and support them in implementing sustainable initiatives.
Our guiding purposes are to support the transformation of sustainable tourism to become the standard of our industry and to reinforce why TourRadar is the number one Adventure Booking Platform with sustainably organised and executed adventures. We have set a goal that by 2030, all active operators on our ABP will have sustainability initiatives in place. Additionally, to leverage our position in ABP’s ecosystem and as a signatory of the Glasgow Declaration, we will aim to encourage more of our partners to align with and become signatories themselves.