This Slow Travel Company Specializes in Flight-Free Holidays
Byway Travel, Katherine Martinko from Treehugger says, has replaced airplanes with boats, bikes, buses, and trains.
The travel industry has taken an unprecedented beating over the past year, with country borders closed and flights grounded all across the world. Despite these challenges, an entrepreneurial woman from the United Kingdom, Cat Jones, figured it was a good time to open a travel business – but not just any kind of travel business. This one would focus exclusively on flight-free holidays.
Jones believed the time was ripe for such a business model. Prior to the pandemic, many people were expressing an interest in flight-free travel, some adhering to the Scandinavian flygskam movement ("flight-shaming" in Swedish) that swears off flying for environmental reasons. Now the idea of avoiding planes is more appealing than ever, both for health and environmental reasons.
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Byway Travel wants to make it easy for others to travel this way. It's ideal for people who are time-poor or don't have the resources to do all their own research. "We take the legwork out, make it straightforward, and they can have this joyful journey," Jones explains.
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"We are very conscious of finding the gorgeous things that are off the beaten track, under the radar, away from the crowds. A whole lot of local knowledge is needed to make that work," Jones explains, which is why Byway sometimes partners with tourist boards that have a deep, intimate knowledge of their own regions.
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This model has been tremendously successful thus far […]. Jones says she expected to spend far more time educating people about the benefits of slow travel, but that hasn't been the case. She explains: "There are a lot more people coming to us, saying, 'I can't holiday as I normally would, but I still want a trip that's exciting, different, romantic.’ Once they've tried it, they're hooked."
Jones attributes this partly to a mental shift triggered by lockdown. People have gotten to know their local areas better. They've become aware of how vulnerable independent businesses are and more interested in developing a sense of community. "That's part of slow travel, too […].”
Byway's hope is to make this type of travel the norm. It wants everybody to travel flight-free a lot of the time, rather than cater to a small set of people who always and only ever travel flight-free.
Jones points there are lots of people who don't yet know how rewarding it is to travel like this: "There's that paradigm of 'get on a plane, fly to B, do your stuff at B, fly back to A, and that's how a holiday works in lots of people's minds." But we're in a moment when more people are actually open to doing it differently.
The current atmosphere is exciting and full of energy. After being around for years as a concept, the slow travel movement is booming. "There was a 300% increase in business in February compared to January, then again in March," says Jones. "It feels like the moment has finally come for slow travel."
This is an excerpt from an article originally written by Katherine Martinko and published by Treehugger.
