AS climate change guilt among tourists grows, many hotels and resorts in emerging hotspots in Southeast and East Asia are touting their environmental credentials in an effort to cash in on the “eco” tag. What exactly makes an “eco” resort remains to be defined, with no worldwide standards that hotels and resorts have to meet to claim the tag. Many of the resorts marketing their green credentials in Cambodia and neighboring Laos are modest properties in pristine jungle settings. They use locally-sourced materials, some solar power and try and give back to poor local communities while causing as little impact as possible. In Thailand, environmentally-friendly policies are becoming more high tech, with homemade biofuels, intelligent lighting, and organically-fertilized herb gardens all wooing tourists concerned about their carbon footprint. “People are saying: ‘If I want to travel, I'd better make it environmentally conscientious,'” said Juergen Seidel, a director for Six Senses, which has hotels and resorts in Thailand and Vietnam. Six Senses plans by 2020 to produce enough clean energy to power all of its operations as well as feed electricity into local grids, said Seidel. “Every year there's a 10 or 20 percent increase of travellers in this niche market we're providing,” he said. For Cambodia, which is still pulling itself out of poverty and rebuilding after decades of civil war, it is not always easy being green. The new minimalist 16-room riverfront Quay Hotel in the capital Phnom Penh boasts that it is one of the first businesses in Cambodia to completely offset its carbon emissions. But their all-natural soap is flown in from Thailand and there is nowhere to buy items such as chemical-free linen, said Michelle Duncan operations manager for FCC, the group that owns the hotel. “We're a hotel trying to do our bit to offset emissions in the country,” said Duncan. “In London or Australia or wherever, it's a lot easier to recycle.” In Cambodia, tycoon Sok Kong recently said the environment was his “first concern”, despite his plans to build two luxury golf courses in the country's Bokor Mountain protected area. Yin Sorya, an eco-tourism adviser to the Cambodian government, said that local officials often do not understand what makes sustainable tourism. “When they (Cambodian officials) talk about eco-tourism, they talk about golf courses or five-star hotels,”” Yin Sorya said. “Here in Southeast Asia, they want high-market mass tourism.” Carbon offsets A United Nations report last year found that tourism, in particular air travel, accounted for about five percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide – the main greenhouse gas that traps the sun's heat and fuels global warming. Top airlines and tour operators keen to shore up their green credentials nowadays offer customers carbon “offsets” to compensate holiday pollution. One of the first to introduce carbon offsets in France, in January last year, was high-end tour operator Voyageurs du Monde. “Voluntary compensations have been a total failure,” said company chairman Jean-Francois Rial. “Only one percent of our clients really paid the cost of the CO2 emitted by his trip,” he said. Now his company simply taxes travellers without first asking their opinion, adding 10 euros to a ticket for a long-haul flight, tantamount to the price for a half-tonne of CO2. “Clients have to pay twice, for the tour and the offsets.” Low-cost air companies Easyjet and Atlas Blue believe they have the solution. “Customers just tick a box when they're buying the ticket, the same way they would opt for travel insurance or not, it's must simpler,” said Matthieu Tiberghien, who is in charge of a programme called “Action Carbone.” According to a survey for French rail, 65 percent of travellers on the country's trains claimed to be ready to fork out five percent of the price of the trip to compensate for their carbon emissions. But the percentage who actually put their hands in their pockets was far less. A year after the national SNCF railways introduced “offsets”, a mere 3,000 people have bought into the system out of a total 5.5 million travelers. “It may be a modest result, but it does highlight a growing consciousness among the public,” said Christophe Leon, marketing manager for the SNCF Internet site Voyages-sncf.com. The site therefore has doubled the stakes by pledging to make its own matching donation to a good cause – through partner association Goodplanet – each time a traveller buys an “offset.” Donations Air France, which initially blasted the none too air-friendly SNCF carbon emission calculator, has since last October also been urging its customers to “compensate” by sending donations to the same green group. While Air France remains mum on the results of its green-friendly campaign, Goodplanet said that up until now, barely 1,000 Air France customers had sent in donations. British Airways, the first airline to introduce carbon “offsets” in March 2006, is equally discreet about the outcome, as is German flag carrier Lufthansa, who launched its offsets in September 2007. But TUIfly, a subsidiary of Europe's top tourism firm TUI, said seven percent of its clients had bought carbon «offsets» since last November, to the tune of 250,000 euros. Though rail travel is less harmful to the environment than air travel, since last November Eurostar too has joined the green bandwagon. As the travel industry adopts more sustainable practices, there are so many different “green” standards on the market right now that tourists are left scratching their heads. The problem is that few tourists seem eager to write off their green guilt.
