Sustainability Impact Measurement for Small Tour Operators

Summary

Program Example:
STOMP (Sustainable Tourism Operations & Measurement Program)

Developed By:
Ethical Travel Portal

Key Lessons:

• Consider the specific context of small tourism businesses. Small businesses face unique challenges related to their operations. Solutions promoting sustainable business practices need to address these challenges in order to be relevant.
• Enhance linkages to local businesses to strengthen tourism's benefits to local economies. Local tour operators are key players in responsible travel, supporting local economies and ensuring tourism benefits stay locally. As an industry we need to advocate for a system that supports such local ecosystems by strengthening small businesses.
• Make it easier for travellers to be well-informed. Travellers can - and many want to - make purchase decisions that positively impact local communities. It’s up to the industry to make it easier for more travellers to do so.  
• Make transparency a core part of how we do business. Sharing sustainability and local impact data transparently is good business. Travellers appreciate having access to easy-to-understand data on where their money goes, and are more likely to trust those operators that communicate transparently about costs and impacts.  

Supporting Sustainability with Data

Targeted to small and medium tour operators, STOMP (Sustainable Tourism Operations & Measurement Program) is an operations and booking management tool that enables transparent measurement and sharing of data on local sustainability impacts, developed by Ethical Travel Portal, a travel company based in Norway, which is led by Linda Veraasdal and Raj Gyawali.

Built by Ethical Travel Portal (which received a grant from Innovation Norway to co-finance the development) and socialtours, STOMP is based on existing business practices (e.g. a costing pie chart shared with travellers) and combined wisdom of working on the ground as a small responsible tourism-focussed tour operator in Norway and Nepal for decades.

Based on the experiences of working with spreadsheets, calculations, reporting mechanisms, the team invested time into deeper research, and developed and piloted an online solution that addresses both the business needs of small tour operators and the sustainability objectives, including the key value of transparency in travel and tourism.

Software Solutions to Empower Small Businesses

Research after research shows that travellers want to travel sustainably. But do they actually know what that means, apart from reducing their carbon footprints?

Travelling locally is a great way to travel more sustainably. By supporting local small businesses - who tend to work with local partners and have small footprints - travellers can ensure tourism benefits local communities they are visiting. In reality, however, economic leakage is a major challenge in global tourism. And a big part of this challenge is larger international players dominating markets and making it harder for small local businesses to compete.

STOMP has been created to address this challenge head-on, by providing small local operators a competitive edge. The platform helps professionalise small locally owned businesses through technology. STOMP is built to help professionalise marketing, costing, inventory, stakeholder management and operations of small tour operators, which can in turn help engage more travellers in sustainability, and truly “mainstream” sustainable tourism from the demand perspective.

Promoting Transparency and Building Trust

When communicating about sustainability, it’s important to engage travellers in a transparent way right from the moment they come in contact with an operator - when they make a request.

Transparency is a key pillar of STOMP, both because it’s important for businesses to operate in a responsible and financial sound way, and also because engaging travellers transparently helps create trust. And this trust leads to faster bookings and higher lead conversion - two of the biggest problems that small operators face.

With STOMP, tour operators achieve this through their “Sustainability Receipt”, which provides an easy-to-understand overview of the price of a tour, and where the money goes - including local partners and suppliers involved in providing services such as accommodation and transportation offers, and different aspects of tour activities.  

The sustainability Receipt is key to the layering of sustainable practices at the operational level. Because this receipt leads to a higher conversion and trust by the travellers, it tells the operators that working transparently yields higher results, especially considering that many travellers are already seeking to travel more responsibly.

When we are able to show that there is demand for responsible businesses, we can encourage more and more businesses to invest in a more sustainable and responsible way of operating, including those businesses that have not yet been actively engaged in the sustainability space.  

And more broadly speaking, if more and more tour operators adopt the transparent approach, we can also create a push for more transparency in the industry as a whole.

Key Ingredients for Lead Conversion

STOMP has been designed by tourism entrepreneurs for tourism entrepreneurs, reflecting a deep understanding of the needs and pain points faced by small businesses. Converting interested users into paying customers is among the most important challenges for small operators.

As such STOMP offers many options to support conversion, such as:

• A beautiful easy-to-read professional custom itinerary for the traveller.
• A cost calculator to easily and accurately calculate and present the tour costing.
• A pricing pie chart and a map, showing travellers exactly where their money goes - based on the stakeholder database on the back end.
• A summary of local stakeholders involved in a trip, with percentage of local ownership.
• A clear explanation of who the stakeholders are, and why working with local partners makes the trip a success.

All this leads the traveller to trust the operator more, and that is a big factor in lead conversion. It also tells the traveller that they are trusted and respected. Many travellers booking through STOMP have mentioned that they have never seen anything like this, that they have never been presented with a breakdown of costs and a list of stakeholders. This is something for both travellers and businesses to become more used to, as transparency should be the norm, not an exception.  

The software provides these tools that help small tour operators achieve higher lead conversion. The last ingredient is in the hands of the tour operator - basically working fast, communicating well and on time with the traveller.