Site visits, done properly — travelling less and looking harder

Due-diligence travel has a reputation problem in ecological concept development: the person building a business around lower-impact hospitality is often also the person racking up the most air miles, flying to assess potential sites, vet suppliers, and walk properties before committing capital. It's not hypocrisy exactly. It's a genuine tension between two forms of rigour — you can't fully evaluate a site or a supplier relationship from a spreadsheet, and some decisions are too consequential to make sight unseen.

But "some site visits are necessary" isn't the same as "every site visit as currently planned is necessary," and the gap between those two statements is usually bigger than it feels when you're booking flights under deadline pressure.

The actual size of the number

Business air travel is typically the single largest contributor to a company's indirect carbon footprint — bigger than energy use, bigger than most operational categories combined. A single return transatlantic flight generates somewhere between one and two tonnes of CO2 per passenger — roughly the same as several months of an average person's household energy use, for one trip. Aviation as a whole accounts for 2–3% of global emissions, a figure that sounds modest until you consider how concentrated it is among a relatively small share of frequent flyers, disproportionately business travellers making exactly this kind of due-diligence trip.

The travellers themselves are ahead of most company travel policies on this. Recent research into business travel attitudes found that the vast majority of business travellers — over 90% — plan to actively reduce their trips' environmental impact over the coming year, more than double the number who say the same about personal travel. The specific tactics they're reaching for are worth borrowing directly: combining nearby visits into a single longer trip instead of multiple round trips, defaulting to rail over air wherever the route allows it, and prioritising destinations and partners within a shorter travel radius when the underlying decision allows for it.

A framework for deciding which trips earn their footprint

Not every visit needs the same scrutiny. A useful filter: does this trip change the decision, or does it confirm something you already know? Site visits that change the decision — the first assessment of a property, the initial supplier vetting, the moment you need to physically stand somewhere to know if it's real — earn their footprint. Repeat check-ins, relationship maintenance, and trips that could genuinely be replaced by a detailed video walkthrough and a trusted local contact usually don't, however habitual they've become.

When a flight is genuinely necessary, rail is almost always the lower-footprint option wherever the route exists and the schedule allows it — for most of Europe, this is a real, practical alternative rather than an aspirational one. Where flying is unavoidable, some airlines now offer sustainable aviation fuel options made from waste and residue feedstocks rather than virgin material; the impact reduction is real, though still partial, and shouldn't be treated as a full offset.

If you offset, do the due diligence you'd expect from anyone else

Carbon offsetting for the flights that remain is common practice, but it's also an area with real variance in credibility. A credit that doesn't fund a project delivering the emissions reduction it claims is worse than no offset at all, because it launders the number without changing anything real. The same diligence you'd apply to a supplier claim — who verified this, how recently, is the evidence public — belongs here too. Offsetting isn't a reason to skip the harder question of whether the trip needed to happen in the first place.

Travelling less and looking harder isn't a compromise on rigour. Fewer, better-prepared visits, backed by thorough remote groundwork beforehand, usually produce a more considered decision than a full calendar of shorter trips squeezed in around other work — and the concept you're building will be easier to defend, to guests and to yourself, if the process that built it matches the values it claims to have.