Long before you pack your bags, your digital footprint is already adding up. The average traveler spends more than five hours consuming travel content and views 141 travel-related pages in the 45 days before booking, according to research by Expedia Group and Luth Research. On the day of booking alone, the average reaches 25 travel-related pageviews. And the journey has not even started yet.Tourism’s environmental footprint begins in the digital world with inspiration, search, comparison and booking, and returns there after the trip through ratings, reviews, photos and experiences shared on social media. Yet this digital layer is still largely missing from tourism sustainability assessments. That is what Corvinus University of Budapest and Carbon.Crane set out to explore. As part of the project, university students used a research version of Carbon.Crane’s Webpage Carbon Scanner to measure predefined digital guest journeys across 43 five-star hotels in Hungary. Each journey covered four page types: the homepage, image gallery, room listing and room detail page. The difference was strikingThe carbon footprint of the highest-impact digital guest journey in our sample was 18 times higher than that of the lowest. We also found that on average, 18.2% of the modelled emissions could be avoided through image optimization alone but for some websites, this relative reduction exceeded 60%. To make the hotels comparable, every website was modelled at the same traffic level: 1 million pageviews per month, annualized over 12 months. Under this standardized scenario, the 43 websites would account for around 2,158 tonnes of CO2e per year. Image optimization alone could reduce this by approximately 393 tonnes of CO2e, while saving close to 1,699 MWh of electricity annually. It’s important to note that these are not the hotels’ actual annual emissions. However, they effectively show what happens when differences of just a few grams are multiplied by hundreds of thousands or millions of pageviews. Small per click. Significant at scale.Digital emissions are not tourism’s largest climate impact, and optimizing a hotel website does not replace the need to decarbonize transport, buildings or operations. But digital has an important advantage: it is measurable, repeated at scale and directly reducible. And many of the same changes that reduce unnecessary data transfer can also make websites faster and improve the guest experience. Sustainable tourism therefore starts earlier than we may think.
Sources: Expedia Group & Luth Research (2023): Path to Purchase |
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