It is undeniable that more and more tourism businesses have started thinking ‘green’. And quite successfully too, even if some may not be getting much beyond a few slaps of ‘greenwash’. This can only be a good thing, as the tourism industry can make a huge difference to the world we live in when it comes to helping save the planet. Whether through significant reductions in energy consumption, reducing / reusing / recycling, emphasis on sustainable forms of travel, or indeed a focus on local suppliers and the local community – or ideally all of these – tourism businesses small or large can each do their thing. No, should do their thing.
When we set up Mazzard Farm some 4 years back, there was no question as to whether we’d go the green route. The question was how far we could realistically push it, given our relatively small size and associated budgets. What we found was that we could actually achieve a lot, with most steps taken not costing us a penny. Having won a small cabinet full of green tourism related awards in the meantime, a comment many people make goes along the lines of “your green ethos must have really helped you fill up so quickly”. My initial response to this was “Well, it is early days, but I am sure it helps”. A year ago that would have changed into “Not sure, but it won’t have done us any harm”. Now, just over 3 years since opening, I am not even sure whether the latter luke-warm response is actually true.
And this explains the headline: is green tourism fact or fiction? Is there actually a true market for green travel? Or is it all talk and no action? Judging by the number of articles written about, and presumably for, the green tourist, and the number of web portals and magazines dedicated to them, you would think that this market must be fairly sizeable. Indeed, that there are plenty of people out there for whom the ‘greenness’ of their holiday destination in one of the main factors, or the main factor even, when picking their holiday. Sadly, I am getting more and more signals that this group is actually rather small, and that as a product, green tourism is a minute niche product at best. And I am concluding that even for a multiple green award winning holiday business like ours, dedicated green visitors are not going to keep our bread buttered. In fact, it probably wouldn’t even allow us to buy the bread!
Allow me to provide some evidence: we spend some 30% of our marketing budget on listings with green portals and adds in green magazines. Yet, less than 2% our web traffic originates from these! Worse, since opening, just one (from well over 600) booking can be attributed directly to people having used one of these green portals or read some green magazine! To put this in some perspective, almost 6% of Mazzard Farm bookings are from families with twins, who are a demographic group as small as 1.5% of the UK population – yet, we don’t target this group at all, leave alone spend any of our marketing budget on them. Yet, contrary to Green Travellers, when did you last hear anyone referring to ‘families with twins’ as a significant special interest group?
To further substantiate my concerns whether these committed green travellers can actually fill a room when together, I decided to do a little experiment earlier this month. We put together a highly attractive ‘green offer’, and ran an active twitter and facebook campaign pushing the offer. From looking at the retweets, the offer has by now been under the eyes of some 15,000+ people on twitter alone. We have yet to receive the first enquiry. This experiment mirrors our attempts last year to push various green breaks, launched during the reasonably high profile Green Tourism Week. Again, we saw not one single uptake. Or enquiry even for that matter.
Don’t get me wrong, we didn’t go green as some sort of marketing ploy, and we would have made exactly the same decisions regarding green investments today as we did 4 years back, but just because we believe in being a ‘good’ business. Nor would I suggest that for some of our guests it hasn’t been a factor in deciding to join us. What we are seriously questioning though is whether the time and money spent on focussing on a potential group of dedicated environmentally conscious guests is the best way forward. I’m afraid that at present I can only conclude that it isn’t. Then again, we may have just been looking in the wrong places…
Ruud Jansen Venneboer
Owner Mazzard Farm holiday cottages, East Devon, UK
Winner of 2010 Devon Tourism Excellence Awards for Sustainable Tourism and Winner of Winners
