Environmental Sustainability – Building Brighter Futures Through Sustainable Practices

Travel brings with it an awareness of how fragile our planet is and we believe that we have a responsibility to ensure that our people and our customers explore our world in a sustainable manner. The protection of our environment is essential to the future of tourism and, as one of the world’s larger travel groups, we believe we are well positioned to play a role in affecting this kind of positive change where we work, live and travel.

CARBON OFFSETTING PROGRESS

As well as offsetting our Duty Travel emissions, we are now offsetting all Co2 produced from our stores’ electricity and gas usage plus travel events and conferences in the United Kingdom. We have also invested in wind farms in India to increase renewable energy and employment opportunities for communities in rural India. We are currently investigating carbon management options for our Australian operations.

THE FUTURE OF TRAVEL BROCHURES

For trip planning, travel brochures remain a key tool for many of our customers, so to facilitate a more sustainable approach we are focusing on offering more sustainable options for this popular resource. We have significantly reduced the numbers of printed brochures; we also encourage our people and customers to access e-brochures in store or at home/on their device as part of the sales process; we also ensure that the printing we do is PEFC certified with all left over stock being sent to the recycling plant.

REDUCING PAPER CONSUMPTION VIA APPS & FUNCTIONALITYAcross our Leisure and Corporate Business, we offer quotes / itineraries via email whenever possible. In addition, FCTG Corporate offers the Sam :] smart travel assistant app and through the acquisition of Umapped, FCTG Leisure brands now offer the Trips itinerary management app to customers. Apps greatly reduce the current practice of printing hard copies of the itinerary for customers, making it an environmentally friendly alternative. In the near feature Trips will also provide customers with access to their quotes which will further help us reduce the current printed copies customers receive when they leave our stores. In addition, we’re now able to provide Electronic Customer Acceptance (ECA) forms to customers. As this is a legal requirement for each booking, it is anticipated that this will generate a significant reduction of paper usage across our retail footprint.