Incentive travel is an excellent way to provide your employees with a one-of-a-kind and unforgettable travel experience. Is it, however, possible to do so in a sustainable manner?
Sustainability is a challenge in any element of business—you need to consider how every action you take can affect the environment, your community, and your staff internally. While sustainability has been on the rise for years, there’s no doubt that incentive travel provides an opportunity for businesses to consider alternative modes of travel and venues that have a minimal environmental impact.
Here are some examples of sustainable best practices in incentive travel programs.
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Eco-friendly accommodations
One of the best practices for sustainable incentive travel is to select eco-friendly accommodations. In many cases, hotels are more than willing to accommodate requests for sustainable incentive travel and can make it easy for you.
Be sure to ask about local transportation options or whether they have bicycles available for rent if you plan on using the hotel’s location as a point of interest. If there’s an event or location in an area with public transportation, ask if they have information on bus or train schedules to help you plan your route. Hotels will often have pamphlets on local attractions and businesses that are environmentally friendly, in case you’d like to use them as destinations of interest during your stay.
Building a sustainable team as part of the incentive trip
An excellent practice for sustainable incentive travel is to organize sustainable team-building activities such as planting trees or cleaning up a beach during the incentive trip.
These activities not only enhance relationships between coworkers but also give back to the community, both physically and emotionally. By setting an example with sustainable incentive travel, businesses can do their part to help reverse climate change and preserve the environment for years to come.
Support the local economy
One way to plan environmentally friendly incentive travel is to support the local economy by eating locally. Many restaurants offer local specialties, and if a business group orders from a menu that is predominantly made up of local ingredients, it could help a local farmer or fisherman. Additionally, since transportation means are usually involved with incentive trips, having meals that were prepared locally will lessen the carbon footprint incurred by the trip.
Carbon offset programmes
Carbon offsetting can provide a way for businesses to contribute to sustainable travel in a cost-effective way. Offsets may be purchased for your program, for example, by paying a third-party vendor to invest in renewable energy initiatives or by funding reforestation projects that absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
One of the most common types of offsets is Carbon Neutral®, which means that your business plants enough trees, funds clean energy projects, or engages in other mitigation activities to balance the number of carbon emissions generated by your program.
Reusable products
Leveraging reusable items is an easy way to cut down on the waste produced while on an incentive trip. When you give your employees reusable items like water bottles or luggage tags with your company logo on them, you’re encouraging them to bring them back to their homes rather than losing or throwing them away when they get there. By storing the items for potential use at home or on a subsequent business trip, they are also helping to reduce waste from this particular trip.
As we can see, if you want to organize a sustainable incentive trip, you have a variety of options. By giving your plan just a little bit more thought and working with experts in the field, you can significantly improve the outcome.
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