The Netherlands said no to Booking.com’s greenwashing. Travelers need to be vigilant too

It’s happening: Europe is cracking down on greenwashing. Recently, The Netherlands told Booking.com that its sustainability rankings were “possibly misleading,” and in response the Amsterdam-based company has ended the program.

The program, called Travel Sustainable, launched in 2021 and gave hotels a ranking of 1 to 3+ to compare their sustainability efforts with one another. But the methodology behind the rankings wasn’t robust enough to support the program, The Netherlands’ Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) said in an article about the program going offline. The program only ranked hotels that were affiliated with the program, which could have falsely painted some hotels as not taking any efforts to be sustainable. It also wasn’t clear to consumers what the rankings were based on.

“The claim ‘Travel Sustainable’ may wrongly give the impression that traveling is sustainable,” ACM said. “Additionally, it was not sufficiently clear to what aspects the claim refers to, which may result in a distorted impression of the actual sustainability efforts of accommodations.”

After ending the program, Booking.com published a list of FAQs for hotel partners in which it said it would focus on third-party certifications moving forward.

The hotel platform isn’t the only tourism site receiving scrutiny for greenwashing. Late last year, Which?, a nonprofit consumer watchdog and magazine, looked into the sustainability marketing of five airlines’ tour operations: British Airways, Tui, Virgin Atlantic, Easy Jet, and Jet2. Where it found unsubstantiated claims, it contacted the companies directly—in some cases resulting in the airline changing its wording.

“Tui’s description of the entire holiday as ‘green and fair’ seems a stretch,” Which? wrote, adding that “the eco hotel is ‘absolutely marginal’ compared to the CO2 your flight emits to get you there.

“Tui told us it has no intention of ‘distracting’ consumers, and, after we got in touch it removed any mention of ‘green and fair holidays’ from its website.”

Also in late 2023, the Advertising Standard Authority (ASA) in the UK banned advertisements from Air France-KLM, Lufthansa, and Etihad for greenwashing. Lufthansa had to remove a line saying “Fly more sustainably,” and Air France has been sanctioned for similar language: “Air France is committed to protecting the environment: travel better and sustainably.” Etihad had to strike references to environmental advocacy that it couldn’t seem to prove.

“While we welcomed Etihad’s decision to remove the phrase ‘environmental advocacy’ from future ads, we had not seen any evidence that they were engaged in such advocacy,” the ASA said, according to travel industry news site TTG.

Around the same time, the ASA also ordered Intrepid Travel—which owns Adventure.com—to remove a misleading billboard campaign in the London Underground. The ad featured two women in front of the pyramids of Giza with the text,  “People and planet-friendly small group adventures since 1989.” The ASA banned the ad after a complaint that “planet-friendly” was misleading as travelers would presumably have to travel—and, more likely than not, fly—to Egypt to partake in the tour.

In a response to the ruling, Intrepid’s Zina Bencheikh, managing director of the company’s Europe, Middle East and Africa tours, called it a “positive step that regulators are becoming more stringent around advertising claims related to climate change and the environment and they will investigate even just one complaint.”

“The ASA’s ruling on ‘planet-friendly’ was a good learning opportunity for us,” said Bencheikh, according to Skift. “This will encourage all travel companies to be more mindful of how they talk about their impact on the environment. Regulation is rapidly evolving. It’s up to us to not only do good work, but find the clearest way to communicate it to our customers.”

For travelers, assessing a company’s eco credibility can be challenging. But one way to do it is to look for hotels that have been certified by third-party agencies that evaluate a wide range of sustainability efforts. The Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC), is one. B Corp certification can also be a good sign—especially as you can easily dive into the details of a hotel’s environmental efforts on B Corp’s website (although organizations can achieve B Corp status with fairly flimsy environmental outcomes if they score highly in other impact areas). 

To help companies refrain from greenwashing in the first place, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority has published a Green Claims Code with a checklist for sustainability claims. All claims must be truthful and accurate; clear and unambiguous; devoid of strategic omissions; encompassing a product’s entire lifecycle, rather than just its creation; and substantiated.

In other words: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

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