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Saturday September 27th 2008

First carrier bags, now holiday brochures to get charge

A tour operator says it will become the first to charge for its holiday brochures as it aims to reduce its carbon footprint and save around 20 million pages of print a year.

i-to-i offers holidays where travellers can take part in volunteering projects around the globe ranging from education work in Tanzania, elephant care in Sri Lanka, building projects in Costa Rica, to wallaby rehab in Australia.

The company, which in 2007 in the UK alone produced 131,500 brochures totalling 19,462,000 printed pages, has put all of its brochures online allowing users to read exactly the same content.

For customers who still prefer a printed brochure, in November i-to-i is trialling an on-demand system which allows the user to request specific, relevant brochure segments which are then printed bespoke and sent to them in the post.

If this proves popular, the company is looking to charge a set fee for its print-on-demand travel brochure service with the customer's fee going into a fund which will support its overseas projects.

Mat Lewis, Head of Meaningful Travel at i-to-i, said: “It has long been known in the travel industry that there's a lot of wastage in printed brochures - too many are produced, far too many are binned and we need to do something about it.

“We carried out our own research and 96 per cent of respondents support our efforts to reduce excessive printing, while just 14.3 per cent said they would prefer a printed brochure over a download.

“So that's the direction we'd like to take the business in. However, we appreciate that some holidaymakers will always want to flick through a brochure and feel the pages, so for those people we're looking at a bespoke, paid-for option. This will still reduce printing as it will only be the relevant sections being produced and sent to the people who really do want them.

“In the same way that supermarkets started charging for carrier bags - and we're seeing wastage being reduced there - we're looking to kick-start the same with holiday brochures.

“i-to-i is responsible for a mere fraction of the 100 million brochures printed in the UK every year, but it's a start, and if all holiday companies followed suit, collectively we could save a lot of wasted print and help the environment.”

i-to-i has yet to finalise plans of the costing structure, but says that if the trial proves popular, a bespoke, print-on-demand brochure could cost around £1, plus postage.

The Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) estimates that at least 100 million holiday brochures are printed each year and that travel agents sell, on average, just one holiday for every five brochures they produce.

Tagged as: i to t | travel | carbon footprint |

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