Inntravel

A word from Inntravel:

Inntravel and ‘responsible tourism’
Responsible tourism has been at the heart of our business since we began selling holidays over 25 years ago. It’s therefore no surprise that we take our social, environmental and cultural responsibilities very seriously, and we’re proud to have been awarded the maximum 5-star status by AITO for our commitment to providing holidays which are, by their very nature, ‘responsible’.

RT is not a bandwagon for us - it’s ‘in our genes’
Many of our holidays take place in remote, rural areas where depopulation is a threat to the local economy. By holidaying in these regions, our customers help to bring employment and regeneration to these areas. Many of the walking and cycling routes also help to keep open traditional drovers’ roads and other ancient paths. In addition, we provide a wealth of information on the history and gastronomy of our chosen regions - this helps to promote, and thereby help maintain, local cultures and traditions.

Individual and independent
The hotels and taxi companies we use are, almost without exception, local and family-run businesses. An increasing number of our hoteliers feature local produce on their menus, something that we support and promote. Many also have an environmental policy, relating for example to laundry, energy conservation, resource use etc, and we encourage this as much as possible. The fact that our holidays are for individuals rather than groups also allows us to work in very quiet villages with small hotels and guesthouses offering as few as two or three rooms.

Providing choice and flexibility
An increasing number of our customers are choosing to travel on holiday by rail, taking the Eurostar from St Pancras, and we offer a ‘by rail’ price option wherever our destinations can be reached comfortably in a day from the UK. We provide a summary of these holidays - plus a selection of those which are more commonly reached by air but which also have strong environmental credentials - on the responsible tourism section of our newly relaunched website, inntravel.co.uk.

Leading by example
Our offices, sympathetically converted from a disused farm building, are well insulated and use energy-efficient lighting. We perform an annual audit of our office carbon footprint to ensure that we are keeping it as small as possible. As part of this process, we closely monitor heating and electricity usage, as well as other resource-use such as paper, and we also look at how many of our staff car-share – as our office is not served by public transport, we encourage this wherever possible; currently around a third of our staff share transport on a regular basis. We use paper from sustainably managed forests, and the envelopes in which we mail our brochures are made from recycled polythene and are themselves fully recyclable. Similarly, the folder in which we provide our customer documentation is made from recycled plastic and is fully recyclable – or, indeed, reusable, as many of our loyal customers appreciate! We recycle as much waste as possible, including paper, cardboard packaging, plastic bottles, batteries and tin cans. We also send all used printer cartridges to a charity that refills them. We offset all our business air-travel emissions with a financial contribution to Climate Care, and also encourage our staff to offset their own personal air travel.