Sustainable Travel: A Practical Guide to Reducing Your Impact Abroad

Global tourist arrivals are projected to reach 1.8 billion by 2030, according to research hosted on the European Commission's tourism transition-pathway platform, which notes the resulting tension between the economic benefits of tourism and the Paris Agreement's climate targets. As trip volumes grow, more travelers are asking what they can personally change.

What "Sustainable Travel" Actually Means

UN Tourism, the United Nations specialized agency for tourism, defines sustainable tourism as tourism that "takes full account of its current and future economic, social and environmental impacts, addressing the needs of visitors, the industry, the environment and host communities." The agency breaks this into three pillars that have to be balanced together: environmental (using natural resources without degrading ecosystems or biodiversity), socio-cultural (respecting the authenticity and heritage of host communities) and economic (making sure tourism income is distributed fairly and supports long-term local livelihoods).

UN Tourism also runs practical programs tied to this framework, including the International Network of Sustainable Tourism Observatories (INSTO), which helps destinations monitor their own economic, environmental and social impacts, and the Global Tourism Plastics Initiative, which works with businesses across the tourism value chain to cut single-use plastic.

Why It Matters: The Numbers

Transport is the part of a trip travelers can control most directly, and aviation is the most climate-intensive mode. Aviation accounted for about 2.5% of global CO2 emissions in 2019, according to an analysis by Our World in Data. Between 1990 and 2019, global air travel demand grew roughly fourfold while energy use per passenger-kilometer more than halved — so total aviation emissions still roughly doubled over that period, rising from about 0.5 billion tonnes of CO2 to around 1 billion tonnes, the same analysis found. Because contrails and other non-CO2 effects add extra warming, one study cited by Our World in Data estimates aviation's overall contribution to global temperature rise at about 4%.

Traveler attitudes are shifting alongside these figures. In a Booking.com survey of 32,000 travelers across 34 countries conducted in January 2025, the company found rising awareness of tourism's effects on the places people visit — though a gap remains between stated intentions and everyday habits.

Ten Steps to Travel More Responsibly

Based on UN Tourism's framework, aviation-emissions data and traveler-behavior findings above, the following steps translate the broad idea of "sustainable travel" into concrete choices.

1. Evaluate any trip against UN Tourism's three pillars — environmental, socio-cultural and economic — rather than taking a marketing label like "eco" at face value.
2. Combine or extend trips instead of taking several short ones: because aviation emissions track passenger numbers more closely than they track efficiency gains, flying less often has more effect on your personal footprint than flying on a slightly more efficient plane.
3. Favor accommodation and tour operators that carry independent sustainability certification rather than relying on self-declared marketing claims.
4. Direct spending toward locally owned restaurants, guides and shops — 73% of travelers surveyed by Booking.com in 2025 said they want their spending to benefit local communities, and 77% said they seek experiences reflecting local culture.
5. Cut single-use plastic on the road by carrying a reusable bottle and bag; UN Tourism's Global Tourism Plastics Initiative works with tourism businesses specifically to reduce this kind of waste across the sector.
6. Check before you go whether your destination has a visitor cap, timed-entry system or access fee, and comply with it — Venice, for example, charged day-trippers €5–€10 on roughly 60 designated dates in 2026.
7. Travel outside peak dates where possible: in the same Booking.com survey, residents at tourist destinations named traffic (38%), littering (35%) and overcrowding (30%) as the problems tourism creates for them most often.
8. Adopt simple energy-saving habits in your room, such as turning off air conditioning and lights when you go out — a habit Booking.com found rose from 43% of travelers in 2020 to 67% in 2023.
9. Ask whether your destination takes part in UN Tourism's INSTO network of sustainability observatories, and follow any local guidance that network's monitoring has produced.
10. Treat "leave it better than you found it" as a working standard rather than a slogan: 69% of travelers in the 2025 Booking.com survey said this was a personal goal.

How Destinations Are Responding to Overtourism

Some destinations are not waiting for travelers to change habits on their own. Venice's access-fee scheme, described by travel outlet Rick Steves' team after reviewing it, required day-trippers aged 14 and over to register and pay €5 (if booked at least four days ahead) or €10 (if booked closer to the visit) on about 60 days in 2026 — every Friday through Sunday from April 3 to July 26, plus a few additional dates including April 6, April 27 and the week of June 1–7. Overnight hotel guests, children under 14 and visitors with disabilities were exempt from the fee but still had to register.

Venice has described the fee as a way to ease pressure from day-trippers — including cruise passengers — on infrastructure and crowding in the historic center, Rick Steves' team reported. Residents' own priorities, however, may not point mainly toward caps: in Booking.com's 2025 survey, only 16% of residents at tourism destinations said capping visitor numbers was the fix they wanted most, compared with larger shares favoring investment in transport (38%), waste management (37%) and environmental conservation (32%).