Travel industry suffers from ‘erosion of trust’ on sustainability claims

Tui Group head of sustainability Ian Corbett has suggested the travel industry suffers from an “erosion of trust” among customers when it comes to companies’ environmental claims.

His comments, made during Travel Weekly’s Sustainability Summit, came after the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) found that the majority of adverts from travel agencies featuring environmental claims appeared likely to break the rules.

Corbett said ASA’s support service offering advice is “brilliant”, adding: “I completely buy into all the reasons for it because there is this erosion of trust among customers because they’ve seen it [misleading claims] so many times that they don’t believe anything.”

Justine Grimley, operations manager in ASA’s complaints department, recommended that travel firms should hold the evidence supporting a claim rather than relying on third parties’ words. 

She also said adverts should be limited in the scope of their claims.

She revealed the ASA would continue to monitor the performance of the travel and tourism sector.

“Transport generally, including travel, is one of the areas of significance for us on our climate change project,” she said.

She added that the latest research suggests the ASA has “work to do” to help companies build confidence in their environmental claims.

“We’ll be looking a little bit more about what ‘good’ looks like rather than who’s got it wrong,” she added.

ASA’s research, which involved a review of 362,000 online adverts, found that 99% of travel agencies are not making environmental claims.

Only 329 of the adverts featured green claims. Of those, 213 adverts from 23 advertisers appeared likely to break the rules, often due to “vague, broad or unsupported claims”.

Susan Deer, director of industry relations at Abta, said: “The ASA wants us to be able to talk about all the great work that everybody’s doing in the industry, and we want to help members do that, but the important thing is you can’t do it in a sweeping way – you need to talk about the specifics of what you’re doing.

“Particularly when you’re talking about environmental claims, you do need to have the information to back them up.”