How to Travel More Sustainably, in Luxury

The phrase “sustainable luxury travel” has been so thoroughly co-opted by marketing departments that it is tempting to dismiss it entirely — another category, like “wellness,” that has been stretched to cover almost anything a hotel wants to sell. But underneath the noise, there is a genuine and useful distinction between travel that is merely comfortable and travel that is also considered: about where money goes, what infrastructure is used, and what is actually left behind in the places visited. It is possible to travel well by both measures at once, and it does not require sacrificing comfort to do it.

Look past the certification, at the ownership

Sustainability certifications for hotels and resorts vary enormously in rigour, and a badge on a website tells you very little on its own. A more reliable signal is ownership and staffing — properties genuinely embedded in local communities, employing and training staff from the surrounding area rather than importing management wholesale, and paying suppliers directly rather than through opaque international contracts. This is not always visible from a booking page, which means it is worth asking directly, or booking through a travel advisor who has actually visited the property and can speak to how it operates day to day. Our guide to how to choose a luxury travel advisor covers exactly this kind of due diligence, which matters more here than in almost any other part of trip planning.

Scale itself is a reasonable proxy, though an imperfect one. Smaller, independently run properties tend to have a lighter footprint and a more direct relationship with their surrounding environment than very large resort complexes, simply by virtue of using less land, less water and less energy per guest. This is not a universal rule — some large resorts run genuinely rigorous sustainability programmes — but it is a useful starting heuristic when comparing two otherwise similar properties.

Questions worth asking before you book

• Where does the property’s water and energy come from, and has it published anything specific about its usage, rather than general commitments?
• What proportion of staff, and particularly senior staff, are drawn from the local community?
• Does the property source food locally, and can it name specific suppliers rather than speaking generally about “farm to table”?
• What happens to waste, particularly plastic and food waste, on site?

Travel slower, and fewer places

The single most effective change most travellers can make has nothing to do with which hotel they choose, and everything to do with how many places they try to visit. A trip built around two or three destinations, with several nights in each, has a meaningfully lower transport footprint than the same length of trip compressed into five or six short-haul flights between cities. It is also, quite apart from the environmental argument, a more pleasant way to travel — our piece on how to plan a slow-travel itinerary makes the case for this approach on its own merits, independent of sustainability concerns entirely.

Where flights are unavoidable, direct routes generally produce a lower footprint than itineraries with multiple connections, and it is worth weighing this against the marginal cost saving of a cheaper, more circuitous route.

Spend where it is felt directly

One of the more reliable ways to ensure a trip’s economic benefit reaches the community it visits is to spend deliberately outside the resort itself — a meal at an independent restaurant, a guide booked directly rather than through a large tour operator, crafts and goods bought from the maker rather than a resort gift shop marking up the same items considerably. This is a small, practical habit that compounds meaningfully over the course of a longer trip, and it tends to produce more interesting experiences along the way, too.

“The best trips I’ve run for clients weren’t the ones with the fanciest hotel,” a Bali-based travel advisor told us. “They were the ones where the money actually stayed in the village we were visiting.”

A word on carbon offsetting

Carbon offset programmes, now offered by most major airlines and a growing number of hotels at checkout, are worth understanding rather than either dismissing outright or accepting uncritically. The quality of offset projects varies enormously — some fund genuinely additional reforestation or renewable energy projects that would not otherwise exist, while others fund initiatives that would likely have happened regardless, delivering little real additional benefit. If offsetting matters to you, it is worth researching the specific scheme a provider uses rather than simply ticking the box at checkout; independent reviews of offset programme quality are published annually and are not difficult to find with a little searching.

More broadly, offsetting is best understood as a genuine but partial answer, worth pursuing alongside — not instead of — the more structural choices covered above: travelling slower, choosing properties with real local investment, and flying fewer, more direct routes. None of these choices alone solves the underlying tension between travel and its environmental cost, but taken together they represent a meaningfully more considered approach than either ignoring the question entirely or assuming a single offset payment resolves it.

Sustainable does not mean austere

It is worth being clear that none of this requires giving up genuine comfort. Some of the best-run sustainable properties in Asia are also among the most luxurious by any conventional measure — beautifully designed, superbly staffed, serving excellent food — and the two qualities reinforce rather than undercut each other. A property that treats its staff and surrounding environment well tends, unsurprisingly, to be a more pleasant and better-run place to stay in every other respect too. Properties built around the principle of quiet, considered design over scale — the kind our piece on the quiet islands where Asia’s design hotels are going next explores — tend to sit naturally at this intersection.

Travelling sustainably in luxury, in the end, is less a separate category of holiday and more a set of better questions applied to the trips you were already planning to take. For more on choosing properties and itineraries that hold up to this kind of scrutiny, our Travel & Stays archive is worth browsing alongside this piece.