According to a survey by French rail company SNCF, 65% of passengers say they're hap[y to pay extra to offset the carbon emissions of their trip. But only 3,000 out of a total 5.5 million travellers ever do.
Credit: SNCF
PARIS: Top airlines and tour operators keen to shore up their green credentials nowadays offer customers carbon offsets to compensate holiday pollution. The problem is that few tourists seem eager to write off their 'green guilt'.
The idea is simple enough: 'offsets' are schemes by which a tourist when paying his ticket can also buy into a project elsewhere that will compensate for the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) resulting from his trip. But calculating the size of that carbon footprint apparently is not so simple.
A Paris-New York return flight, for example, might emit between one and three tonnes of CO2, depending on the different calculators used by companies and environmental groups. That means the price of an offset can vary by a factor of five - from 15 to 75 euros (A$25 to A$125).
Travel offsets a failure?
One of the first to introduce offsets in France, in January 2007, was high-end tour operator Voyageurs du Monde. "Voluntary compensations have been a total failure," said company chairman Jean-Francois Rial. "Only one per cent of our clients really paid the cost of the CO2 emitted by his trip."
Now his company simply taxes travellers without first asking their opinion, adding 10 euros (A$16.50) to a ticket for a long-haul flight, tantamount to the price for a half-tonne of CO2.
Rial attributed the failure of the system in part to the complications of putting it into place. "Clients have to pay twice," he said, first paying the tour operator for the holiday, then having to agree to pay for the offset on an environmental site on the Internet.
Low-cost air companies Easyjet and Atlas Blue believe they have the solution. "Customers just tick a box when they're buying the ticket, the same way they would opt for travel insurance or not, it's must simpler," said Matthieu Tiberghien, who is in charge of a programme called Action Carbone.
Intention versus the reality
According to a survey for French rail company SNCF, 65 per cent of travellers on the country's trains claimed to be ready to fork out five per cent of the price of the trip to compensate for their carbon emissions. But the percentage who actually put their hands in their pockets was far less. A year after SNCF introduced offsets, a mere 3,000 people have bought into the system out of a total 5.5 million travellers.
"It may be a modest result, but it does highlight a growing consciousness among the public," said Christophe Leon, marketing manager for the SNCF Internet site, Voyages-sncf.com.
The site therefore has doubled the stakes by pledging to make its own matching donation to a good cause - through partner association with the non-government environmental organisation, Goodplanet - each time a traveller buys an offset.
Compensating for emisisons
Air France, which initially blasted the none SNCF carbon emission calculator for being too biased against air travel, has since October 2007 also been urging its customers to 'compensate' by sending donations to the same green group.
While Air France remains silent on the results of its green-friendly campaign, Goodplanet said that up until now, barely 1,000 Air France customers had sent in donations.
British Airways, the first airline to introduce carbon offsets in March 2006, is equally discreet about the outcome, as is German flag carrier Lufthansa, which launched its offsets in September 2007. But TUIfly, a subsidiary of Europe's top tourism firm TUI, said seven per cent of its clients had bought carbon offsets since November 2007, to the tune of 250,000 euros (A$410,000).
Though rail travel is less harmful to the environment than air travel, since November 2007 Eurostar too has joined the green bandwagon.
