Responsible travel

With over 66% of our emissions coming from how our guests travel it felt essential to make responsible travel a key impact area. We’ll use inspiration, influence and incentives to help guests change how they travel to our places and be responsible travellers when they get there. We recognise being a responsible traveller isn’t always easy, but we also know it can often improve your experience, so we’ll be finding ways to remove barriers to better travel.

In 2023 we said we would…

Collect better public transport options from 70% of owners, and we…

  • Surveyed 13,000 guests to find out how they travel to our holidays
  • Prepared a survey to go out in January, gathering better information from owners on public transport
  • Prioritised ‘Public Transport’ above ‘Driving’ directions on our listings
  • Shared tips with owners on making their space more public transport, EV and active travel friendly
  • Needless to say, we didn’t hit our 70% target. We quickly realised this needed much bigger thinking and started laying the foundations to work towards this

Improve booking journey to help more guests choose responsible transport, and we…

  • Mapped our customer journey for ethics and responsible transport and started implementing changes
  • Grew our Canopy & Stars places with EV charging by 50%, with searches up by 45% in the past 6 months
  • Updated our confirmation email series to inspire guests to travel by train

Inspire with flight/car free content and explore travel incentives for guests, and we…

  • Formed a long-term partnership between Sawday’s and Byway travel – launching 4 x Byway train itineraries
  • Created new collections of the best places to access by train
  • Launched ‘The Wild Weekends’ series, which saw Jack Harries use train and EVs to reach our places
  • Sent influencer Lottie Gross and her dog on some inspiring train journeys
  • Celebrated getting to The Lake District car-free in our overtourism campaign
  • Unfortunately, didn’t launch our incentives, but have started scoping this out and it’s in the plan for 2024

Form industry groups and lobby decision makers for improved train travel, and we…

  • Didn’t manage this in 2023. However, we did strike up an ongoing partnership with Campaign for Transport, giving them a £250 voucher for a giveaway and celebrated some of the best holidays to take using a bus

Next year we will…

Launch carbon labelling on Canopy & Stars

Add an icon to highlight places most accessible by public transport

Add post-booking train travel education and explore incentives

Soft launch the ‘Sawday’s Awards’ to celebrate our greenest places