Travel firms can’t please everyone but can communicate in a balanced manner, says Silver Travel Advisor managing director Lisa McAuley
‘Dear Silver Travel Advisor, I understand that you’re in the travel business to make money and the last 18 months have been tough, but it seems to me you (and the whole industry) have just reverted to pre-Covid behaviour with no second thought to the climate emergency.’
That is an excerpt from an email received in our customer service inbox recently from a Silver Travel member. This on the back of a similar email I received days earlier.
Resisting the urge to reply ‘tough – you have no idea’, I sat back and contemplated how we, as a business, might address this and how I put this into context.
In full transparency, we don’t have a sustainability strategy – yet! But we do have a roadmap as to how we’re going to be part of the solution not the problem.
Like so many reading this column, we’re a small business, we have the desire to do the right thing but often don’t have the time. So, the first thing we’ve done is to acknowledge we need to make time and bring sustainability into our overall business thinking and forward planning.
Until this point, we’d never heard from our audience directly on the topic of sustainability.
Indeed, our research last year pointed to it being quite low on the radar. When we asked members to rank what was most important to their holiday choices, sustainability ranked eighth out of ten.
For further context, we have a membership of 89,000 so to receive two emails from a large member base doesn’t ring alarm bells.
What it does do is make me want to get ahead of where we are currently and look to control the narrative, to the extent that we can.
Sustainability is multi-faceted, and I’m no expert. Supply chains in our industry are incredibly complex and if I simply looked at the big picture it would overwhelm the reality of what we can do.
So often in business we’re taught to look at the big picture but, in this instance, we’re drilling down to make things achievable.
At a recent team meeting we asked ourselves; ‘what does sustainability mean to us? What are the challenges with marketing sustainability initiatives? How do we communicate short term goals and small steps we take without fear of criticism?’
Headlines such as one published recently in mainstream media are never going to sit well with me nor many in the industry I would image; ‘Ditching planes for green travel could create 300,000 more jobs than would be lost’, the headline boldly and potentially falsely claimed.
The same article goes on to say: “The science on climate change makes it very clear that we have to reduce the number of flights we take in the UK. This study shows that reining in the aviation industry would actually have a positive impact on jobs and would help with the transition to a low-carbon economy.”
The more I read, the more I wanted to take a flight. My reaction was at odds with the fact that I’m in the midst of defining our sustainability strategy – how ironic.
The point to this is that I don’t want to be dictated to, patronised, nor have my choices limited, and by ‘reining in the aviation industry’ my choices may be impacted.
Sustainability is complex, but so is human behaviour. I learnt a long time ago that you can’t please everyone.
However, what we can do at Silver Travel Advisor is communicate in a balanced manner with our audience about holiday and travel choices.
We can also extol the virtues of the social and economic benefits of travel and tourism. There aren’t too many positive headlines on the topic so we’re going to make that a part of our strategy.
Small steps…