As we start to recover from the pandemic and tourism begins again it is great not only to be taking our customers to their favourite destinations but to hear the responses from our local partners, who are finally seeing their livelihoods restarting.

We can really see the importance of tourist money in these destinations and it has renewed our focus. We have spent the last 15 months revisiting our sustainability approach and, in April of this year, launched our new Lighthouse Project initiative.

 This focuses on spotlighting all the areas we are investing in to help People, Planet and Places. We have carried out a complete audit of our holiday portfolio and what we are doing where so that we can better understand our current impact, both positive and negative, and then plan for delivering more positive benefits into the future.

In the last year we have removed single-use plastics from our whole operation, invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into charitable initiatives to support our Lighthouse Project principles and trained our global teams in what we are doing and why to increase awareness.

One of our biggest investments has been in supporting the launch of The Ocean Clean Up. This is a not-for-profit organisation with a mission to remove the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. By 2025 the expectation is that The Ocean Clean Up will have removed half of this huge plastic island currently floating in the Pacific and introduced hundreds of interceptor barges on rivers to prevent more waste finding its way into our seas.

Our monthly Lighthouse Spotlights communicate the different initiatives that we are involved in supporting and let our employees, our partners and our guests know how they can support them too.

Our future work in progress includes adding more Lighthouse Projects, focusing more on community-led tourism, measuring our impact on the areas we travel to and working out how we can make this ever more positive, and off-setting the carbon emissions of our holidays by working with a not-for-profit planting trees in forests around the world.

We have committed to having our first fully electric river cruise ship by 2027 and are working with partners on the rivers to help them create clean, renewable electricity so we can run carbon-free in the future.

We still have a long way to ensure we are 100% #travelforgood but I’m a great believer in the sentiment expressed so eloquently by Edmund Burke, a famous 18th century Irish statesman, economist and philosopher: who said: “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.”