How to travel more consciously — and offset your emissions for free
Oh, another boring hotel booking site, you might think. Well, think again. Goodwings is the game-changing new player on the arena, a company that climate compensates your whole trip without charging you a penny for it.
And right now — if you are a company making your bookings via We Don’t Have Time, big discounts await you.
Before covid, tourism was pumping 5 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year, and the curve just continued pointing the wrong way.
So in a post-pandemic time, do we really wanna go back to repeating those same devastating mistakes again?
No, thought Christian Møller-Holst, a serial entrepreneur based in Copenhagen, Denmark. After having worked with various sustainability issues for 20 years, he founded Goodwings out of a deep sense of urgency.
”We are doing this because we have to. We need to bridge the old economy with the new, and we need to create a future where we still can travel, even if a bit differently”, he says in an interview with We Don’t Have Time.
Christian Møller-Holst is no enemy of air travel, but he would like to see a major cut-down on unnecessary business trips, as well as a big change in people’s travel habits.
”A lot of people are going skiing every year. They go by plane, and then they complain that there is no snow! If you go by train, you can sit very comfortably, get a lot of work done and skip all the hassle of flying.”
Technically, Goodwings works more or less like other hotel booking platforms, but with one major difference. When you book your hotel via Goodwings, your climate footprint for the whole trip is compensated for. Your train, taxis, flight, hotels, cars, everything. At no extra cost.
”The major hotel booking platforms can’t afford this, because they spend so much money on advertising”, Christian Møller-Holst says. ”By spending much less on advertising we managed to find a way to take that cost, and still do business. For me, it's about creating a kind of circular movement. We partner with organizations and climate leaders who promote Goodwings to their followers, and what we do in return is allocating money to carbon-offsetting projects that would normally have gone into advertising.”
Carbon offsetting is a big divider within the climate community. The skeptics see it as a modern form of letters of indulgence, a decree the Catholic Church sold en masse in the mid 15th century, exempting the faithful buyers from the punishment for their sins.
”I would like to remove CO2, and I’m looking into that. But at the moment it’s too expensive”, says Christian Møller-Holst. ”The second-best alternative is to compensate.”
Goodwings have chosen to support projects to protect existing forests, which has been deemed one of the most important forms of carbon offsetting.
Via the Carbon Calculator, Goowings is also aiming to educate its clients and partners on how to make their carbon footprint smaller, even before embarking on their journey.
Here’s how it works: When booking a hotel via Goodwings you can add a bunch of extra information, like where you’re going, how you’re getting there, if you are taking a taxi or a bus to a from the airport or train station, et cetera. The more details you provide, the more accurate carbon emissions calculations Goodwings can give in return. Christian Møller-Holst has often noticed that the numbers come as a surprise.
”For instance, if I go from Copenhagen to Berlin by flight or by car, it is almost equally bad for the climate. But if I carpool, and put three-four guys in the car, the emissions per passenger are reduced significantly”, says Christian Møller-Holst. ”For the same reason, air traveling in first class is worse than traveling in economy class, simply because you take up more space on your own.”
Goodwings have now partnered up with We Don't Have Time, and has got its own Open for Climate Dialogue page™ on the We Don’t have Time platform. This makes it easy for Goodwings to communicate its climate work to its customers and clients, while at the same time making it equally easy for people to give feedback on the company’s climate effort.
Goodwings has already received “tons of feedback”, to use Christian Møller-Holst own words. A lot of it concerns carbon offsetting, and a lot of it is positive.
”The feedback is crucial for us. As a company we need to grow in constant dialogue with our network, and we need to be very sensible to the feedback we get. We need to know why they would consider using us, and how we could improve”, says Christan Møller-Holst, adding that he encourages hotels to be open for climate dialogue as well.
Thanks to the new partnership it is now possible to book hotels via We Don’t Have Time. To celebrate this, Goodwings and We Don’t Have Time is offering all membership companies a 25 percent discount on the Premium plan for businesses, which gives access to wholesale rates on one million hotels, all whilst enjoying free full-trip carbon offsetting. This means saving money and saving the planet at the same time.
Ingmar Rentzhog, CEO and founder of We Don’t Have Time, is thrilled about now being able to offer carbon offsetting to all partners and members.
”Just imagine if every employer would start using Goodwings to book the hotels for their employees and customers. Not only would they offset tons of carbon, but they would also be educated on how to reduce their carbon footprint. That’s real climate action”, he says.
MARKUS LUTTEMAN
