By Georgina Davies, Communications Manager, The Travel Foundation

When we talk about climate action for tourism destinations, the focus often lands on how to engage local businesses or develop lower carbon products - both important levers to reduce emissions and improve resilience. But there’s another crucial yet often overlooked tool – marketing. 

Marketing that is fully integrated into both your climate strategy and your overarching destination goals can have a transformative impact on climate emissions from tourism. It can also bring multiple benefits to the destination, increasing resilience, optimising visitor value, and shifting demand away from peak season.

Destination marketing should sit right at the heart of climate action and destination stewardship. It’s not about greenwashing, or superficial sustainability claims designed to boost image, but about taking a climate lens to all marketing decisions - making lower emissions and better resilience core elements of your strategy and your business.  

Below are five tactics used by forward-thinking destination marketers.

1. Target markets based on climate cost, as well as benefits

Transport to and from your destination is likely to make up around 75% of tourism-related climate emissions. Of all the transport options, flights, particularly long-haul flights, which are predicted to account for over 40% of tourism emissions by 2030 (see Envisioning Tourism in 2030 and Beyond), are the most significant polluter. So, targeting markets that can reach your destination with fewer emissions, e.g. domestic markets, neighbouring countries and those that can travel by car, coach, or train, is likely to have a big impact.

This doesn’t mean reducing tourism’s value. In fact, it may even help you to increase it. By factoring the ‘climate cost’ of different markets into your targeting decisions alongside the benefits that matter to your destination, you’ll get a more rounded picture. For example, your cost / benefit analysis might also include the market’s impact on seasonality, or on the geographical spread of visitors. The key thing is not to omit the climate cost altogether.

 Xavier Font, Professor of Sustainability Marketing at the University of Surrey, explains “What we cannot do is continue managing our decisions on target marketing just based on benefits and not on costs. You don’t manage your own bank account just looking at your income and not considering your expenditure. If you did that, you’d be bankrupt and in a tourist destination we’re only doing this because the expenditure is actually paid by somebody else or is not acknowledged.” 

The Netherlands Board of Tourism & Conventions (NBTC), for example, uses an eco-efficiency index to highlight the most valuable visitor per unit of CO2 and recommends its DMOs focus marketing activities on domestic and neighbouring countries. Similarly, Innovation Norway, is developing a model to better understand climate emissions from its markets and prioritising work with short-haul tourists.

2. Increase the length of stay of your visitors

Encouraging visitors to stay longer can help to grow visitor value without increasing emissions from travel. For example, last year, the Thompson Okanagan Tourism Association (TOTA) in Canada invited visitors to ‘stay a while’ with a promotional campaign designed to showcase the region’s hidden gems, including outdoor adventure and local culture.

This tactic is particularly important for destinations that are dependent on air travel for their visitor economy.

3. Address seasonality

As well as leading to economic inefficiencies and strain on local communities, peak season visitor concentration can increase climate emissions. This is mostly due to the infrastructure that must be built for peak capacity, leading to the highly carbon-intensive construction of hotels and other facilities which then go underused in the off-season but still require maintenance and energy.

For example, in Rhodes, Greece, the peak energy demand driven by tourism during the hot summer months was exceeding supply limits and a new diesel-fired power plant was built to stem the energy deficits. This meant that Greek citizens were subsidizing an expensive oil-fired power plant that locked-in the island to another 20 years of fossil-fuelled power generation. (See Destinations at risk: the invisible burden of tourism).

Dynamic pricing, low-season marketing, and year-round narratives such as food, nature, and wellness can help to shift demand. You may also find that low-season markets are more likely to stay longer and be able to travel slower, bringing greater value with fewer emissions.

There are, however, challenges and for some destinations this may not be an easy nut to crack. The low season may not be suitable for tourism, local communities may not want tourism all year round, or your most attractive markets, including your lower emission markets, may not be able to travel out of peak season. Simply growing visitation in the low season is likely to increase emissions and could adversely affect local communities so careful thought and planning is important.

4. Promote lower carbon products

A focus on the promotion of lower-carbon products and experiences can reduce the climate cost of visitors during their stay. This includes prioritising the promotion of itineraries, accommodations, restaurants, attractions and experiences with lower emissions and which include regenerative practices. For example, Visit Norway has a dedicated section on its website for ‘Green Travel’ which includes eco-certified travel providers and enables visitors to minimize their carbon footprint.

Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) have an important role to play here, helping to promote and incentivise good practices, and enabling destinations to gain maximum return on investment from their efforts to create better, lower carbon products. Such support can also help destinations meet other sustainability objectives, such as promoting locally-owned tourism businesses, or off-season travel to support destination resiliency.

5. Influence visitor behaviour

Marketing tactics can also help to influence the behaviour of visitors in ways that can impact the carbon footprint of your tourism economy. Whilst there is growing awareness and interest in sustainable options, travellers are first and foremost driven by the desire to have the best experience. So, the most effective way of encouraging better choices is to work with local businesses to design climate friendly options into the experience itself. This means making better choices the easiest, or default option. For example, designing restaurant menus to include only locally sourced, lower carbon meal options. Your marketing efforts can then support these choices, highlighting benefits to your visitors.

Milena Nikolova, a leading expert in behaviour solutions for travel and co-founder of BehaviorSMART said, "We have enough knowledge from behavioural science to know that how choices are presented often determines which one(s) will be selected by the majority. Choice design is powerful, so destinations should use it in ways that reflect their vision and goals. If we claim that we are serious about climate action and lowering the carbon footprint of the visitor economy, then we should make low-carbon options the default. For example, that would mean setting walking and public transportation directions as the default option for reaching places of interest across all communication channels.”

Again OTAs, with their reach and powerful influence on visitor awareness and choice, have a role to play in supporting destinations to effect visitor behaviour, including by providing signposting or carbon calculators to make it easier for travellers to choose the lower-carbon option.

To learn more about climate action for destinations, sign up to the Travel Foundation’s free, online Destination Climate Champions training course.