Vielha, Catalonia — Adventure travel operators must move beyond carbon offsetting and start measuring how much customer spend actually stays in destination economies, panellists at the Adventure Travel Trade Association’s AdventureELEVATE Europe 2026 conference said on May 20.
Speaking at the Palai d’Esports de Vielha in Val d’Aran, panellists Alex Narracott of Much Better Adventures and Charlie Cotton of ecollective, moderated by ATTA Director of Community Laura van Meer, said the sector risks complacency by viewing itself as already responsible while the broader tourism industry stalls on emissions and local economic benefit.
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Why it matters DMOs and tour operators face mounting pressure to prove that tourism delivers real economic value to host communities, not just headline visitor numbers. The shift from offsetting to impact measurement could reshape how destinations price products, structure supply chains and pitch to investors, with implications for procurement teams across the trade. |
Cotton, whose company advises tour operators on emissions strategy, told delegates that the simplest test of a sustainability strategy is asking a company to describe it without using the word itself. He referenced an exercise his firm runs with leadership teams, asking them to select two of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals that matter most to their business.
“The tourism industry needs to get better about defining what sustainability means to us, and to be a bit more ruthless and say no to things we can’t actually do,” Cotton said.
Narracott was blunter. Much Better Adventures has dropped the term internally, replacing it with “positive impact on nature”. He argued that the industry needs to shift from passive language to active commitments. “We need to live with urgency, from passive words like sustainability to active words like impact,” he said.
Cotton said the most encouraging shift among operators in 2026 is a move away from carbon-neutral marketing claims built on cheap offsets. More companies are taking ownership of their emissions and committing to year-on-year reductions in footprint per customer, he said, with some building climate funds that invest in electric vehicles, solar installations and operational efficiency.
Flight emissions remain the hardest problem. Cotton said a growing number of operators are now willing to engage with the question rather than treat it as outside their control. “We are seeing more companies take ownership of the flight question. That’s a nightmarish thing but we need to influence flight emissions,” he said.
Narracott said the adventure sector should not rest on its comparatively strong emissions profile. The challenge, he said, is influencing the wider, mainstream tourism industry rather than congratulating itself on marginal gains.
The most substantive announcement came from Narracott, who said Much Better Adventures has spent the past year working with economic modelling consultancy Equator to build a tool that tracks where customer spend leaks out of destination economies. The system breaks down every day of every trip, showing money flows, multiplier effects and jobs created locally, and cross-references this against carbon output.
“We can then ask, was the carbon worth it? It’s a difficult conversation but one we can only answer once we have the data,” Narracott said. The tool is being opened to other operators to expand the dataset.
Cotton said the metric he wants the industry to converge on is economic return per kilogram of carbon emitted. Early benchmarking, he said, shows Antarctic cruises scoring poorly while cycling tours in the Alps perform well.
Customers are not driving change
Both panellists pushed back on the idea that consumer demand is forcing operators to act. Narracott said customer expectations have not meaningfully shifted in five years. Travellers assume operators are handling sustainability on their behalf and rarely interrogate the detail.
Cotton said he was disappointed by customer behaviour, including his own, and noted that change is being driven almost entirely by founders and committed employees rather than market signals. “I’ve never expected customers to act differently. It is on us as an industry and it should be,” Narracott added.
Iran war
Cotton pointed to the US-Iran war as a sharp illustration of how fossil fuel dependence inflates trip costs and drains money out of destinations. He estimated that a typical Maldives trip now costs around £350 more than before the conflict, with the additional spend flowing to fuel companies rather than local operators or communities.
The Maldives, which burns fuel for inter-island transfers and electricity generation, could dramatically reduce that dependence with floating solar panels, he said.
Narracott said destinations and operators should pivot from volume to value. “If you can get the same economic value from one customer versus 10 customers, you can resolve a lot of problems right there and deliver a better experience for the customer,” he said.
Communicating without greenwashing
On reporting, Cotton dismissed the impact reports of major OTAs such as Expedia and Booking.com as corporate fluff, calling for more numbers and fewer words. He said impact reports that disclose failures and abandoned initiatives build more trust than polished narratives.
Narracott said Much Better Adventures uses data rather than claims and is open about what it does not know. Both panellists called for greater use of video and trained guides to communicate sustainability stories on the ground.
Asked what one action delegates should take away from the session, Cotton was direct: “Whichever company you spend the most money with, tell them you won’t pay their next invoice unless they tell you the economic impact of what you’ve bought.”