Travel Tips

How to Spot Greenwashing in Travel: 7 Questions to Ask

By Aditya

Most eco-travel claims cannot be checked. Here are the seven questions that separate a genuinely responsible operator from good marketing copy.

Greenwashing in travel is the practice of presenting a trip, hotel or operator as environmentally or socially responsible without evidence that it is. It is rarely outright lying. It is usually a true but trivial fact, such as a refillable water bottle or a towel reuse card, standing in for a claim about the whole business.

It works because almost nothing in travel marketing can be checked by the person reading it. There is no legal definition of "eco-lodge." Anyone may describe a trip as sustainable. The word "responsible" has no gatekeeper.

Here is what to look for instead.

1. Is there a named certification, or just a word?

"Eco-friendly," "green," "sustainable" and "responsible" are unregulated. A certification is a claim somebody else has checked.

Names worth knowing: GSTC (Global Sustainable Tourism Council) sets the benchmark criteria that most credible schemes are built on. Travelife, EarthCheck, Green Key and B Corp certify against published standards with audits.

Ask: certified by whom, against what standard, and when was the last audit? A certification with no renewal date is a certification someone bought once.

Be aware that certification costs money, which means some genuinely excellent small and community-run operators are uncertified simply because they cannot justify the fee. Absence of certification is not proof of anything. It just means you have to ask the other six questions.

2. Where does the money actually go?

This is the question that separates most of the field.

Ask: who owns this business, where are they registered, where do the guides and staff live, and what proportion of what I pay stays in the destination?

A trip run by a company in another country, using drivers brought in from a city and staying in a chain hotel, can be carbon-neutral on paper and still extract nearly everything it earns. A homestay network where the household is paid directly keeps a far higher share of the money in the place you visited, regardless of what anyone's website says about the environment.

3. Are they reducing, or just offsetting?

Carbon offsetting has a poor record. Many forestry-based offset schemes have been found to overstate their impact substantially, and an offset purchased against an unchanged flight does not reduce emissions.

A credible operator can tell you what they have actually changed: shorter internal flights replaced with rail or road, fewer vehicles, renewable power at properties, local sourcing that cuts freight. Offsetting on top of that is a reasonable addition. Offsetting instead of that is marketing.

Ask: what have you reduced? Not what have you offset.

4. What is the wildlife policy, in writing?

Wildlife is where greenwashing does the most harm, because the visible version and the ethical version look similar in photographs.

Red flags: any guaranteed sighting; feeding or baiting to attract animals; riding, bathing or walking with wild animals; handling of any kind; "rescue" or "sanctuary" facilities that permit contact with big cats, primates or elephants; off-road driving towards a sighting.

Ask about minimum approach distances, whether vehicles are limited at a sighting, and what the guide does when another vehicle breaks the rules. The answer to that last one tells you most of what you need.

5. Who is in the photographs, and were they asked?

Look at how a company depicts the people in the places it sells. Are they named, credited, quoted, or are they background texture for a traveller's experience?

Operators who have genuine relationships in a community tend to name the people they work with, because those people are the product. Operators who do not, use faces as scenery.

6. Can you speak to the people running the trip?

A great deal of "responsible travel" is sold by intermediaries who have never visited the place and will not be there when you do.

Ask to speak to the operator who will actually run your trip. If the answer is that you cannot, or that everything goes through a booking desk, you are buying from a reseller, and the responsibility claims belong to a company that controls none of the things being claimed.

This is one of the reasons we built Rerooted Travel so that travellers enquire and book directly with the operator. We take no commission on the booking, which means we have no incentive to sit between you and the person answering.

7. What do they refuse to do?

The most reliable signal of all.

A genuinely responsible operator has a list of things they will not sell. They will not run a trip in a particular season because the community asked them not to. They will not take groups above a certain size into a small village. They will not guarantee a snow leopard sighting. They will not visit an orphanage.

Ask directly: what do you turn down? An operator with an answer has thought about this. An operator who says "we can arrange anything" has told you they have no policy.

A reasonable standard to hold

None of this requires you to become an auditor. Three practical habits cover most of it:

• Prefer specific over general. "We employ eleven guides, all from the valley" beats "we support local communities."

• Prefer named over implied. A certification with a name and a date beats a leaf icon.

• Prefer direct over intermediated. The person who answers your question should be the person who runs your trip.

And accept that perfect does not exist. Travel involves getting somewhere. The useful question is not whether a trip is free of impact, but whether the people running it have thought seriously about theirs and can show you what they changed.

What we do about it

Rerooted Travel exists because answering these seven questions for every operator is slow, and most travellers reasonably do not have time.

We assess operators against the GSTC criteria before they are listed, we publish what the assessment covers rather than asking you to trust a badge, and we tier operators so you can see the difference between one that meets a baseline and one doing substantially more. You can read the full verification criteria and how the tiers work.

We also publish the limits of it. A verification is a point-in-time assessment, not a guarantee of every future trip, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.

If you want somewhere to start, the operators behind our community-based tourism experiences are among those where the money and the decisions genuinely sit with the community.