Whole Travel Blog

Bloomberg today announced that Zipcar, the world’s largest car-sharing company, is gearing up for an initial public offering in 2010. Over the past 9 years, Zipcar has grown from an idea conceived in a Cambridge, Massachusetts to a single lime-green VW bug to a fleet of more than 6,500 autos. 

Zipcar helps you go green when you rent a Prius.

Unlike traditional rental car agencies, Zipcar allows members to swipe a card over a dashboard reader, which unlocks the car with the keys already inside. Members can take cars by the hour or for a few days, leaving them at different drop locations based on their online reservations. Even Hertz’s CEO, Mark Frissora, talks about Zipcar: “It’s a cool technology. My two sons use Zipcar. They said, ‘Dad, you have to get into this.’”

At Whole Travel, we’re excited to see Zipcar doing so well. Whether you don’t need a car too often or if you just don’t want to own a car, it’s a great way to reduce the overall number of automobiles produced and reduce our consumption of natural resources. Here’s to hoping the IPO market keeps heating up for green businesses, and way to go Zipcar!

The United States House of Representatives Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection held a hearing titled “It’s Too Easy Being Green: Defining Fair Green Marketing Practices” yesterday. Subcommittee leaders suggested that rules and enforcement practices be put in place over the next few years for green marketing initiatives. This is great news for all consumers, because it will be the government’s first attempt to curb greenwashing and hold companies accountable for their actual environmental and socioeconomic performance when they want to call themselves green.

Is this green?

In his opening remarks, the subcommittee chairman, Bobby Rush, expressed his interest in “…taking up the truthfulness of ‘green’ advertiser claims, consumer perception of ‘green’ claims and the respective roles the Federal Trade Commission and privately run certification and labeling programs in regulating and validating these proliferating claims.” We think this is a great idea, as there are so many certification programs in travel alone it’s difficult to navigate all the information. Whole Travel is looking forward to being part of the solution. Send us your comments and we’ll be sure to pass them along: sustainability@wholetravel.com.

Telefonica, the largest company in Spain, is constructing a 12-building complex to bring 40,000 employees to one main campus in Madrid. The buildings are using a special type of glass to reflect the hot Spanish sun, and panels stick out from the building to act as sun visors. Each of the buildings is to be connected by a covered walkway that will be the world’s largest rooftop photovoltaic installation with 15,000 solar panels capable of producing 4 million kWh annually. Landscaping will be native vegetation which requires minimal water, and that amount of water will be provided by rooftop rainwater collectors.

Distrito C - Telefonica's New Madrid Headquarters

Instead of packing a battery-powered travel alarm clock for your next trip, consider investing in a clock that gets its power from only salt water. In its November 2008 issue, Travel and Leisure reviews 10 new gadgets meant for the eco-minded traveler.

Ranging in price from $16 for the water-powered clock to $2,000 for a biodegradable laptop partially made from bamboo, these gadgets are compact, economical, and easy to use, and are particularly useful if traveling somewhere remote where electricity isn’t a 24-hour commodity.

Some highlights include:

• a solar-powered battery that replaces phone, camera, ipod, and computer chargers
• USB-charged rechargeable AA batteries
• speakers partially made from recycled cardboard

Which gadgets do you plan to pack for your next adventure?

A new trend has emerged in Germany: converting old farms into “Heuhotels” or hay hotels, where guests literally spend the night on a bed of hay.

This trend isn’t just new, it’s also cheap and eco-friendly since guests bring their own sleeping bags and towels.

For a list of “Heuhotels,” visit www.heuhotels.de or check out this New York Times article about it.

There is a big debate about whether traveling to the most untouched, un-traveled corners of the world, visiting indigenous people, can really be counted as eco-tourism.

There is the positive factor that when you travel to a remote location you are supporting the local population, but isn’t there also an element of invasion of privacy, where the indigenous people are de facto “put on display?”

I think it’s one thing if a resort or hotel is created and run by the local people, but a completely different thing if groups of tourists travel hours through jungles and rivers just to have spotted, and maybe even, gawked at “the natives.”  Perhaps indigenous populations should be met on their terms, if and when they establish a tourist destination that they have declared as such, not one that we pronounced a desirable vacation spot.

This is something to keep in mind when planning a vacation – are you intruding into a community that wants to remain private or, in the case of many Amazonian destinations today, are you partaking in a cultural experience that wants to be shared and “discovered” and to whose sustainable growth you are contributing? Due to the rise in responsible, sustainable travel, these issues will begin to resolve themselves in the coming years.

Richard Branson has yet another Virgin endeavor – to transform one of his private islands, Mosquito Island, known as the destination wedding location for a handful of a-listers (Google’s co-founder Larry Page, among them), into the “most environmentally-friendly resort on the globe.”

Included in the eco-friendly plans for his resort are villas powered purely by wind technology and solar panels, air-conditioning “captured” from the cool thermal airflows, meals coming from the island’s organic orchards, and bio-fuel powered beach buggies.  If Branson can inject some much needed energy into  the airline industry, (and he is already planning commercialized trips to the moon), let’s hope these goals are within reach too.