We’re thrilled to announce that in July 2024, our parent company Travel Chapter, became a Certified B Corporation. This means that holidaycottages.co.uk and our sister brands fall under the umbrella of that certification too.
But what does being a B Corp mean and how is our story any different from the 2,000+ B Corps in the UK? We’re glad you asked. Let us take you on a journey, our journey, and tell you how we went from just wanting to do the right thing to joining a global movement looking to reshape business and the economy for the betterment of the planet.
If you want to find out more about how seriously we take responsible tourism, click the button below. But for now, here’s our story…
Responsible tourism
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What does B Corp mean?
To become a B Corp, a company must go through a lengthy application process and then pass a rigorous assessment with criteria covering things like governance, workers, community, environment, and customers.
This assessment is carried out by B Lab, a non-profit organisation that works to transform the economy to benefit people, communities, and the planet. Since 2006, B Lab has been shifting the behaviour, structure and culture of over 150 industries in more than 80 countries in an attempt to move the global economy from one of profit to one that benefits all.
As a B Corp in the travel industry, we recognise that travelling inherently has an environmental impact so it’s important that we strike a balance and try to encourage responsible tourism as much as we can.
Our B Corp Certification is a reflection of the things we were already doing individually and as a business, but now we have this platform from which we can launch new initiatives and reveal all the exciting sustainable and environmental projects that are underway.
Kieran Keohane, Head of Sustainability here at Travel Chapter, had this to say:
We are fully committed to using the B Corp assessment criteria to further support our sustainable pathway. These criteria give transparency to our actions, enabling us to take more accountability and review everything we do, ensuring that the company is always improving as we continue our journey to net zero and beyond.
How it started...
The signs were there. It was clear that we had staff who cared; a conscientious group of people dedicated to raising awareness of environmental matters close to their hearts. Therefore, it was inevitable that our Green Team was founded in 2019, which initially had 48 members – that was over 15% of our workforce at the time. That’s not bad.
The aim of the Green Team was to highlight the need for small changes within the business and promote environmentally friendly practices whilst keeping the message light in these early stages. Events like ‘Plastic-free July’ and ‘Veganuary’ staff lunches were a great start.
Did you know:
- The carbon footprint of a vegan diet can be 75% smaller than that of a meat-based one.
The tendrils of the Green Team continued to probe new areas of the business, whether it was projects that were focused on the minutiae of everyday life at HQ and at our other offices, or ventures that impacted how we interacted with our customers and suppliers.
Regarding the former, we introduced food caddies into our offices to collect food waste (a third of all food produced globally is thrown away, releasing methane which is 25 times more harmful than CO2). We also introduced waste and recycling processes with signage to educate staff and we audited our tea and coffee purchasing methods to reduce food miles and unrecyclable packaging. Regarding the latter, we stopped sending paper booking confirmations to our guests, saving more than 100,000 sheets of paper in a year, and we digitalised all our human resources documents.
Engagement was always going to be a key factor in keeping the green ball rolling. A vegetable garden was planned and cultivated, allowing staff members to reap the produce that was grown, and our ‘Bee Happy Garden’ was launched, which would provide a haven for our local pollinators.
For those interested in looking stylish whilst saving the planet, we had ‘Sustainable Fashion Week Swap Shops’ in multiple locations and clothes repair stations where staff members could pick up pre-loved items or get garments fixed whilst donating to Cancer Research UK or the RSPB.
In the background, other departments were doing their best to affect change, whether it was introducing our first batch of hybrid pool cars or planting 3,000 trees with the Woodland Trust. Additionally, our Marketing department was busy releasing campaigns to raise customer awareness about holidaying conscientiously through the Responsible Holiday Charter and our Holidays With More Heart campaign in support of the RSPB and the Marine Conservation Society (MCS).
How it’s going...
Since our humble beginnings, our company and workforce have really taken to going the extra mile to do the right thing. The sense of unity that comes from numerous beach cleans is wonderful to see – you can see the pride in the eyes of every single staff member as they rid their local ecosystem of unwanted plastic, whether it’s part of a national beach clean with the Marine Conservation Society or just a local mission with Plastic Free North Devon.
We’ve gone from strength to strength by officially partnering with charities such as the 2-Minute Foundation and the RSPB. We helped the former by setting up litter-picking stations around many of our offices so that staff members and the public could spend as little as 2 minutes cleaning up their local area. We partnered with the RSPB in 2020 and, from 2021 onwards, we started to restore 1m2 of woodland for every booking taken. To date, we have restored over 900k square metres of woodland.
These partnerships resulted in numerous awareness campaigns, both internally and externally. We hosted online and in-person screenings of the RSPB’s ‘Save Our Wild Isles: The Business of Nature’ to raise awareness of what we can do individually and as a collective at work. We also wrote numerous articles to promote these collaborations including blogs about saving our wild isles and the UK-wide climate and ocean resilience projects we’ve been helping the MCS with.
Did you know:
- Despite occupying only 0.2% of the ocean floor, seagrass can capture carbon from the atmosphere 35 times faster than tropical rainforests and can store twice as much carbon too.
Members of the Green Team continued to step up and take time out of their own working day to host webinars and post regular advice bulletins on our internal social platform. Topics such as busting misconceptions about sustainability, what to do during Earth Hour and Earth Day, and the creation of an eco-conscious gift guide were all covered to help staff make better decisions in and out of work.
In 2021, our Facilities team arranged the installation of photovoltaic (solar) panels on the roofs of our offices, starting at our headquarters in North Devon. To date, we have had three arrays installed at our headquarters and one array each at our offices in Whitby, Penzance and Norwich. Since day one of operation, these arrays have produced nearly 400MWh of energy cumulatively, saving over 332 tonnes of CO2 or 129 tonnes of coal burned. We plan to install more arrays and, as the technology becomes more energy efficient, so too will our base of operations.
By this point in our journey, we were really finding our stride. We created our Regional Communities team in November 2022, whose primary focus is to drive social responsibility and sustainability in the areas where our guests holiday. This must be done in a way that delivers economic, social, and environmental benefits to the local neighbourhood, such as providing funding for community initiatives and projects. The team also leads our internal charitable efforts as a company, spearheading our Charity of the Year initiative and volunteer days.
The Charity of the Year initiative began in 2023 with Cancer Research UK, with the aim of raising £10,000 for the charity in 12 months. At the end of an exciting year, we were over the moon to have raised a total of £13,695. This year, we are embarking on an endeavour we have named our ‘National Food Bank Drive’. This initiative consists of two charitable elements: fundraising for our Charity of the Year, Trussell (formerly known as The Trussell Trust) on a national level, and providing support to local food banks near our offices through volunteering and food donations.
Did you know:
- More than 14 million people in the UK live below the poverty line, and one in seven people in the UK are facing hunger.
But like a carpenter building a staircase, we were always thinking one step ahead and during 2023, we started data gathering to prepare our B Impact Assessment (BIA) for our B Corp application process. This was a time-consuming task as we wanted to be as thorough as possible to avoid any future delays. We submitted our application in January 2024 and in July of the same year, after a rigorous review process by B Lab, we were officially B Corp Certified at the first time of asking!
Did you know:
- Over half of all companies fail on their first attempt to certify as a B Corp. This could be because their BIA is set up incorrectly or because their B Impact Score falls below the 80-point threshold.
Continuing our journey...
As we press on along this path of improvement, it’s important that we don’t lose sight of where we began, and that we continue to do the little things that cumulatively have a big impact. We will continue to support our partnerships moving forward, looking for more ways we can actively help. We’ll look to build upon our regional community support and through this work, we’ll endeavour to increase the number of staff volunteering opportunities, to provide even more tangible support to causes that need it the most, causes that are close to our hearts.
But there are also grander plans afoot, led by our recently appointed Head of Sustainability. From a business standpoint, we will continue to reduce our emissions, ensuring that moving forward, we are taking full accountability for our carbon footprint and our supply chain. We will also be reviewing all the offices within our portfolio, to begin the process of focusing reduction actions on the highest carbon emitters.
From a customer perspective, we will be looking to provide our homeowners with support to future-proof their businesses against both climatic and economic changes. This may come in the form of a roadmap to assist homeowners on their sustainable journey, and providing support towards achieving recognised sustainability standards.
Getting better at being better
It’s still early days on our B Corp voyage, our storytelling has only just begun but we’re heading in the right direction. Every 3 years, we will be re-assessed by B Lab, with the assessment criteria constantly evolving and becoming more rigorous. The intention is that we strive to not only retain our certification but to improve our score.
Success doesn’t have to cost the Earth, it’s all about balancing profit and purpose. Watch this space.