Tourism execs encounter guilt trip on green issues

By Roger Blitz l Financial Times

Climate change looms over a major travel industry gathering, where attendees are told to cut back on energy consumption.

LISBON, Portugal - The tourism industry has never had it so good, but its senior executives are feeling strangely guilty about their success and fearful of a green backlash.

The industry is expected to expand by 4.3 percent a year over the next decade and managers are fretting over climate change. They worry that flying is seen as the most polluting activity and are falling over themselves to champion schemes that allow travelers to go on clocking up air miles.

"There is a real conundrum with how we grow in a way we feel good about," said Andrew Cosslett, the chief executive of InterContinental Hotels Group. "We need to find ways of making people feel very good about how they feel about these things."

Cosslett was in Lisbon this month, along with other hotel, airline and hospitality executives attending an annual global conference on travel and tourism.

Some wanted to rally governments to provide the infrastructure to meet the demand of the emerging middle classes of China, India and Mexico, who are readying themselves for global travel.

Others were worried about fuel prices, security, visa problems, technological innovation and the armies of hospitality staff needed to cope with demand which, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council, this year will generate about $7 billion of economic activity.

But no one could escape the dark shadow of climate change, even though they wished it. "We look at climate change as an image issue," said Armin Meier, chief executive of Kuoni Travel, an operator of luxury tours.

Maurice Flanagan, vice chairman of Emirates Airline, was quite happy to share his trenchant view that global warming was "an argument." He said he was taken aback at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this year at the way that airlines were being "demonized as the cause of all this."

Flanagan said more worrying than the apparent threat to the planet was the real threat to low-cost carriers such as EasyJet and Ryanair. "If extremists get their way, thousands and thousands of jobs in travel and tourism will be lost."

EasyJet itself was more philosophical. "The debate is over," said Stelios Haji-Ioannou, its founder. Airlines had to replace their fleets with modern fuel-efficient engines, he said, "but the replacement process is slow."

Airlines, hotels and other sectors in the industry in the next couple of weeks will pool resources in a public campaign in Britain to demonstrate that they are taking climate change seriously.

They have given up trying to argue the technical niceties of aviation's contribution to carbon emissions. Whether it is 2 percent, 3 percent or 5 percent, aviation has to do something, they have concluded.

For all the talk, practical, meaningful solutions were little in evidence. It fell to James Russell of the Clinton Global Initiative to tell the industry what was expected of it. "Don't be an Exxon," he told the airlines, "Work out what you can do to drive down energy consumption. Travel agents should push hotels for carbon disclosure."

He added: "The message to chief executives is that perceptions are changing and you've got between 12 and 24 months to get on that route."

Printable Version | published May 22, 2007

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