Responsible celebrations. Change the way you travel for sustainable tourism

In France, the festivities generate 1% of all its annual greenhouse gas emissions and travel accounts for a quarter. So why not try another form of tourism?

Between Christmas and New Year, French families travel an average of 200 kilometers, cars and planes combined. During this period, the French send a quarter of their greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere at the end of the year. So can we continue to move as much, as often and as far?

“Yes, we can continue to travel. The question is how do we travel?”, responds Aurélie Sandler, co-general director at Evaneos, a platform that connects future travelers and local experts all over the world, for different stays that bring more value to the country visited. Two to three times more than a classic stay and up to 85% of the total amount spent by tourists, just by choosing activities or accommodation differently.

But also by offering less polluting travel. “We have made the decision at Evaneos to no longer include in our offer short stays of less than five nights which can only be reached by plane. And this is accompanied by the creation of new offers. We can go and do a sleigh ride in the Creuse, visiting Vienna by train to Tyrol, going by bike, taking a tour of the Loire castles. We have great feedback from our customers to have a better impact without giving up their pleasure”explains Aurélie Sandler.

Tourist sites must also adapt

But the efforts of travelers are not enough; the sites that host them must also evolve. Orange helps them, around fifty engineers analyze the mass of information given by mobile phones. The objective is to move towards sustainable tourism. “To give you a few examples, we are able to measure the attendance of a place in real time and therefore adapt the lighting according to the attendance of the place. This means that we are able to measure the attendance of ‘a place and then tomorrow, to predict which street requires lighting’explains Mathieu Ducrot, director of digital products at Orange business.

“The challenge is to adapt the infrastructures, whether it is lighting, whether it is water, forest monitoring infrastructures, for example. Because today, it is a bit all or nothing, that is to say at a given time, we completely stop public lighting. And therefore this also raises security questions”continues Mathieu Ducrot.

Whether at home or elsewhere, seven out of ten French people say they intend to go on vacation this winter. During the holidays, eight times out of ten, trips are made by car compared to 4% by train, which is much more economical but less used.