Survey results – How break-even is your travel organization?
Leisure Lab was born out of a deeply-rooted passion for travel – and out of sheer concern. If all our years of job-related travel have taught us one thing, it’s that tourism is a double-edged sword. It is our goal to provide the travel industry with tips to handle that sword with care.
Sustainable travel has become synonymous with ‘green travel’. There’s absolutely no doubt in our minds that traveling green should be the norm. In fact, reversing climate change should to be at the top of our priority list. However, there are other ways to achieve a more sustainable travel landscape. That is why we came up with an alternative concept that, if implemented correctly, ensures a more sustainable future for travel. It’s called break-even tourism. In essence, break-even tourism is a more sustainable form of tourism in which the gains and strains of the travel industry are distributed evenly across destinations and people. Break-even tourism is not just a buzz word – it’s here to stay.
We consider a travel organization to be break-even if it follows one or more of our guiding principles:
Its customers are distributed evenly across time (outside the high season) and space (outside the most popular destinations);
Revenue is distributed evenly among stakeholders;
Knowledge is distributed evenly among stakeholders;
Travel experiences are distributed evenly in customers’ itineraries.
In a recent survey we asked you – members of the international travel industry – to rate your company on our break-even scale. The response has been overwhelming and reassuring. Your positive feedback has encouraged us to continue along this path towards a more sustainable future in travel. The survey was filled out by 100+ travel professionals. These are the main findings:
BREAK-EVEN SCORE
77.4 per cent of travel professionals consider their travel organization to be break-even. They rated their organization 6 out of 10 or higher and associated it with at least one of our four guiding principles. Though this a promising start, there’s still a lot of ground to conquer. To be continued …
BREAK-EVEN PRINCIPLES
Respondents were also asked which of the four guiding principles of break-even tourism they considered their top priority. For 34.9 per cent of travel professionals an even distribution of customers is key, closely followed by an even distritution of money (33.3 per cent of respondents). These two principles thus score significantly higher than the principles of even distribution of knowledge (15.9 per cent) and even distribution of experiences (15.9 per cent).
Break-Even principles chart
BREAK-EVEN COMPANIES, INITIATIVES AND DESTINATIONS
Which travel companies and initiatives are recognized by their peers as prime examples of sustainable and break-even tourism? Watch this space! In our next newsletter, we’ll present the top 10 organizations, start-ups and destinations mentioned most frequently by survey respondents as key break-even industry players.
