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- Travelers have options for making their travel more "green"
- Traveling without luggage: novel idea or emerging reality?
Travelers have options for making their travel more "green"
Most travelers have probably seen notes in their hotel rooms offering the use of towels and sheets for more than a single day as a way of reducing water and energy consumption. Now, one organization is providing travelers another way to assess the environmental efforts of hotel properties, and even contribute personally to reducing their carbon footprint.
One non-profit organization, called Sustainable Travel International (STI), offers comprehensive climate mitigation advisory services along with websites for locating and rating hotels based on their environmental practices. These sites offer a variety of services and tips for travelers, including ways to conserve resources, reduce bills, and minimize hotels’ – and their guests’ – impact on the environment. Most websites either include a directory of member hotels or offer a search function for finding particpating hotels and their rankings.
Additionally, STI recently launched a program called TravelGreen, which allows travelers to offset the carbon generated by their travel by purchasing “Green Tags” for $1 USD each. The purchase of each tag is “equal to offsetting 35 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions and represents 25 kilowatt-hours of electricity supplied by new wind and solar power,” according to the organization’s website.
For more information about locating and rating participating hotels, or purchasing personal carbon offsets, please visit: www.sustainabletravelinternational.org, www.environmentallyfriendlyhotels.com, or www.greenhotels.com.
Sources: Sustainable Travel International, Environmentallyfriendlyhotels.com, GreenHotels.com
Traveling without luggage: novel idea or emerging reality?
Cost, reliability, and the convenience of traveling without luggage have given rise to a number of companies now offering luggage shipping – some overnight – to business and leisure travel destinations. Companies currently offering these services include, but are not limited to: Luggage Free, Luggage Forward, Luggage Express, SkyCap International, Baggage Quest, Priority Solutions, and Fly Lite.
A review of several of these companies’ websites suggests that these offerings have risen out of the pure hassle of traveling with luggage, including the increasing rate of airlines losing or damaging luggage and rising fees for additional or “overweight” baggage.
Some luggage-shipping companies ship door-to-door, meaning directly from the traveler’s home to the hotel at their destination. Others actually offer more comprehensive services, whereby the company keeps a virtual closet for the road warrior, checking it over after each trip for laundry, dry cleaning and repair needs, then preparing it for the next business trip. This premium service, offered by a company called FlyLite, costs $100 USD per trip, and the traveler simply goes online to select articles of clothing.
Whether the variety of emerging luggage-shipping services are practical for the non-executive traveler has yet to be determined. The level of convenience and price are sure to be the ultimate determiners – the $100 USD charged by the aforementioned FlyLite service is only the beginning of the options and charges currently available. CWT recommends travelers research these companies to find the one that best meets their unique needs.
For more information, please visit: www.luggagefree.com, www.luggageforward.com, www.usxpluggageexpress.com, www.skycapinternational.com, www.baggagequest.com, www.prioritysolutions.com, and www.flylite.com.
Sources: Luggage Free, Luggage Forward, Luggage Express, Sky Cap International, Baggagequest, Priority Solutions, FlyLite
