Plan an eco-friendly honeymoon

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An eco-friendly honeymoon offers the perfect blend of romance and eco-responsibility. By choosing an earth-friendly travel company, staying in green hotels, or opting for other ways to minimize your travel footprint, you'll be starting your life together while helping the planet at the same time.

How to plan an eco-friendly honeymoon

Like any vacation, there are countless ways to green your honeymoon. Consider these basic steps when planning your eco-friendly getaway.

Find it! Eco-friendly honeymoons

Eco-travel no longer means roughing it in a mud hut swatting flies. More destinations are touting their commitment to earth-friendly travel, and you can easily find luxury eco-resorts and packaged deals. Just do your research before signing up; some hotels and departments of tourism use the green label a little too liberally. See Take a sustainable vacation for a list of sites that rate (and often certify) sustainable travel providers in the US and around the world. Below are some travel sites that specialize in helping honeymooners go green or design your own eco-honeymoon (earth-friendly hotels, flights, and rental cars) at Green Travel Hub by RezHub.com.

Leading Honeymoons
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Through its Leading Green Initiative, Leading Hotels of the World offers carbon offsets to honeymooners who book a room in a LHW-sponsored luxury hotel.

Responsible Travel - Honeymoon Ideas
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UK travel agency offers 1,000s of adventure honeymoons with green tour companies and hotels around the globe.

SendUsOff.com Honeymoon Registry
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Offers environmentally friendly options to honeymooners, such as staying in eco-friendly resorts and hotels, donating to carbon offset programs, and volunteering time to help preserve ecologically-sensitive areas and those affected by natural disasters.

Planning an eco-friendly honeymoon helps you go green because…

  • Concious choices about transportation and lodging shrink your carbon footprint: global air transportation related to tourism contributes to seven percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions while a single night in a hotel generates 0.01 metric tons of greenhouse gases.[1]
  • You can support local economies and help them grow sustainably. Eco-lodges hire and purchase locally and put as much as 95 percent of money into the local economy while all-inclusive package tours put 80 percent toward airlines, hotels and other international companies.[2]

Approximately 2.3 million couples get married each year in the US [3], and many follow the big day with a big trip: the honeymoon. In fact, about 90 percent of couples fly away after the ceremony[4]—part of the nearly 900 million worldwide tourists on the road or in the skies each year that have a significant impact on local ecosystems, water, air and wildlife.[5][6]

Most honeymoons require travel by plane, car or another form of transportation, which burns fossil fuels, produces greenhouse gas emissions and contributes to global warming. In addition, hotels consume significant amounts of energy, as do travelers' homes that continue to be heated or cooled. Travel also generates considerable garbage from drinks and snack foods bought en-route.[7] Left unchecked, heavy tourism traffic can exceed a location's ability to sustain it. This pressure on an area's natural environment and resources can lead to soil erosion, increased pollution, loss of natural habitat, strained water resources, ocean discharge, increased risk to endangered species, and heightened vulnerability to forest fires.[8]

Controversies

  • Eco-tourism seeks to decrease travelers’ ecological footprint in wilderness areas and fragile ecosystems around the world. It’s part of a larger movement called sustainable tourism, which looks to not only protect natural areas, but also urban and rural areas, as well as local cultures and economies.[9] Despite ecotourism’s attempt to minimize the impact of tourism on wild areas, it’s often criticized for opening up sensitive “virgin” areas to masses of travelers. This often includes building energy-intensive mega-resorts sporting artificial landscapes that disrupt native plant and animal species. In addition, critics charge that ecotourism strips local economies of their diversity and creates ecotourism monocultures. Local people are not only typically paid low wages but they may not be guaranteed year-round work.[10]
  • Carbon offsets: Many organizations and companies offer carbon offsets that allow consumers to minimize their greenhouse gas emissions from activities such as plane and car travel by purchasing credits toward green projects that reduce carbon emissions. Critics, though, charge that all offsets aren’t created equal.[11] The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which regulates advertising claims, began hearings in 2008 to investigate where offset funds actually go. The concern is that some claims may overstate the eco-benefits of offsets (a form of "greenwashing").[12] For instance, opponents contend that some projects, such as tree planting, may not be worth the $5 to $20 paid per ton of carbon offset because investing in forest protection doesn’t help reduce dependency on fossil fuels the way, for example, renewable energy projects do. Also, the idea of "neutralizing" your carbon emissions requires that offset programs be "additional", meaning they should fund only those ventures that wouldn't otherwise be funded—something that many offset programs don't make clear. In addition, a number of programs aren’t monitored for quality by a third-party.[13] Some groups have developed offset standards or are in the process of doing so, however not all standards are equally stringent. One of the most comprehensive and widely endorsed is the Gold Standard, which certifies offset projects that follow strict criteria and are verified by independent third parties. Another is the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS). Also see A Consumer’s Guide to Retail Carbon Offset Providers, which describes how different offset programs stack up against one another.

External links

Footnotes

  1. Sustainable Travel International - Carbon Neutral Accommodations
  2. Homemakers.com - Low-impact travel: How to be a conscientious tourist
  3. The Conde Nast Bridal Group - American Wedding Study 2006
  4. Grist - A Match Made on Earth
  5. UNWTO Worldwide Tourism Barometer - World tourist arrivals: from 800 million to 900 million in two years
  6. Rainforest Alliance - Sustainable Tourism
  7. Suite101.com - The Eco-friendly Vacation
  8. United Nations Environment Programme - Environmental Impacts of Tourism
  9. Global Development Research Center - Eco and Sustainable Tourism
  10. Global Development Research Center - Eco-tourism or Eco-terrorism
  11. David Suzuki Foundation - What is a Carbon Offset?
  12. New York Times - FTC Asks if Carbon-Offset Money Is Well Spent
  13. Tufts University Climate Initiative - Flying Green: How to Protect the Climate and Travel Responsibly