This summer, as usual, I headed to my home country of Spain to spend the school holidays with family and find a bit of the summer that did not quite seem to arrive in the UK this year. Our first stop was Madrid with its sweltering continental summer temperatures turbocharged by various heatwaves. Temperatures close to 40 degrees Celsius used to come a few times each summer when I was a child, but are now reached most days in July and August.
In a country that relies on tourism for 12.8% of GDP , these global warming impacts are causing significant changes. Some activities such as hiking are becoming unadvisable through the summer. More tourists now choose the shoulder season to travel, and many are starting to head further north to the Cantabric Sea coasts of the Vasc country and Galicia for cooler weather and seas. But climate change has reached these areas too, with fires and droughts in the area impacting locals and those who are trying to have a relaxing time on our shores.
It’s a vicious cycle. A recent study claims that around 10% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide are caused by tourism. As I tried to enjoy the time we had together this summer, the question that popped into my head is this: as an individual, looking for an easy holiday with the kids, is it possible to practise responsible tourism?
There are some obvious culprits that heighten the impact we have when we travel for leisure. Most of our footprint will come from transportation, accommodation and the activities that we take part of when we are away. Let’s have a look at some of them in the context of this summer’s experience.
Transportation
To get to Madrid from the UK we had to fly. Flying is the dirtiest mode of transport and a flight from London to Madrid produces almost half a tonne of CO2e. Unfortunately there are not many viable alternatives for the route from the UK to Spain. Once our child is a bit bigger we may try to do the 24-hour trip by ferry.
Lower carbon travel is easier once we land in Spain. To escape the heat, we, as many, aim for the coast. We travel to Cadiz, the southernmost point of mainland Spain in view of the north African mountains via electric high-speed train, lowering our emissions substantially.
Choice of accommodation
Travelling with a young child can be challenging and we decide to stay in a big, family-oriented hotel with a pirate boat in the pool, a beautiful sandy beach at our doorstep, and a buffet that keeps the effort involved in our everyday to a minimum.
The hotel chosen is part of the Iberostar group, a Mallorquin family company managing 100 hotels. As soon as we step in we can see the pride the group takes in its prioritisation of sustainability and public disclosure of targets and progress. They are clearly committed to shifting the industry to a place that can work without jeopardising its own future. For example, the group has set an SBTi validated target of carbon neutrality by 2030 as part of their 2030 agenda. Will it be enough?
Energy
It is difficult to figure out if a hotel is better or worse than using a smaller Airbnb. In general flats win out on energy efficiency over detached houses. The facilities offered at a big hotel with a pool will, generally speaking, bring up the energy tally.
But our hotel has made a point of optimising its energy use and shifting to renewable sources of power. It has solar panels installed on the roof and uses a number of measures to limit the consumption of energy, including installing insulation and controls to automatically switch off lights and other non-essential power when not in use. The hotel reports that these actions have reduced their energy bill by 6.49% from a 2019 baseline.
Food
I have mentioned the buffet which, while convenient, is not a particularly sustainable option to feed your guests given the amount of food that is wasted everyday. Iberostar does track all their organic food waste, totalling an eye-watering 8,573 tones globally (0.77 kg/stay), including farm waste. They are working to improve this, having tracked an 11.79% savings against their 2022 figures and composting and redirecting most of their food waste.
In terms of the menu, it’s not high on plant-based,, but there are not many options for higher impact items such as beef or lamb either. Instead they promote their choices of diverse, low-impact ‘blue foods‘, an industry term for foods that come from the water, sourcing MSC and ASC certified fish and working to support smaller local fisheries.
Waste
There is a lot of rubbish produced in a hotel with thousands of guests at a given time. But there are things a hotel can do to limit their waste footprint as much as possible. Iberostar claims to have become single-use-plastic-free as of 2020, and, indeed, we saw no single-use plastics during our stay. Instead of plastic bottles in the room, we had a beautifully shaped jar that we were invited to fill up in with cool filtered water from the nearby fountain – a convenient and cheap solution for hotel and guests alike.. There were no disposable coffee cups and the pool bar stocked reusable plastic tumblers for your cocktail of choice.
I was quite amused to find a recycling workshop as part of their weekly entertainment calendar! Not bad at all!
Did we have fun?
For us, this summer’s holiday was a golden time of long, fun days filled with sun and water. Did we manage to remain low-impact on the environment? I am not sure. We made some good choices that brought us closer to our objective, but we are still quite far away from reaching it.
I feel the balance between convenience and sustainability is still pulling us the wrong way, and the industry, while improving, isn’t quite there yet. What we can do is to continue to reduce consumption, support sustainable business practices, and make sure that we keep these things in mind when we think about next year’s choices.
