Mid-Week Yoga & Hiking Retreat in Brecon Beacons

We are working towards reducing our carbon footprint, and here are some ways we, as a company, are doing this. 

We are a 88% vegan company, 10% vegetarian and 2% fish or meat (only when staying in boutique hotels that offer these options). This makes up a huge percentage of carbon emissions that we avoid so easily because our food is still delicious, balanced and even more creative. So, thanks to you all for enjoying our healthy (mostly) plant-based meals. 

The difference: Most travel companies struggle to reduce their travellers’ meat and dairy consumption, which accounts for a large portion of their carbon emissions.

We stay primarily in one location for the duration of the retreat. We have started staying in a few locations on our long haul, but it is limited to 2 or 3 locations over an 8 – 10 night period. Staying in one place means low carbon emissions because we aren’t burning fuel to get around.

The difference: Other adventure travel companies move around every two days, using alot of petrol in vehicles for sometimes only 1 or 2 people. 

Our activities are low-impact—yoga, hiking, surfing, skiing/boarding, whitewater rafting, SUP, and kayaking are all very low-carbon activities, in fact, zero-carbon (except skiing/snowboarding due to the ski lifts, which is also low). These activities are included in the price we measure. The carbon may increase with travel to and from these activities in vehicles. 

The difference: Other travel companies can include high-carbon activities in the price, such as jet skiing, quad biking, and jeep driving, which increases their carbon footprint.

We run more than half of our retreats and holidays in the UK; these are very low-carbon holidays. 

We currently don’t measure our guests’ travel as part of our carbon output because our guests don’t only come from the UK, so it is hard for us to predict this. We also don’t include travel in the holiday price, which is not part of our calculations. We know that we provide these holidays, so we are looking to include this carbon measurement in the future so we are investigating how we can reduce this.

The carbon measurements at the top of the page with the icons are per person for the whole retreat. 

Ultra-low-carbon holidays

These holidays are below 200 kg per person, and our UK retreats are below 100 or even 70 kg, so these are great adventures for low carbon breaks.

Ski holidays are actually low in carbon! 

In France, many ski resorts are turning to green energy to power the lifts. If you eat low in meat and dairy while you’re there and hire your ski equipment, this makes your trip as low-carbon as possible. 

How can you help? 

There are ways that you can help reduce your carbon when coming on our retreats and holidays:

Travel by train, try slow travel across Europe and the UK.
If travelling abroad to Europe or further afield, choose carbon capture schemes, check out Ecologi. Offsetting is not the best thing to do these days, but try carbon capture where you pay for carbon to be absorbed into the environment.
Car share UK – we recommend when guests travel by train to arrive and depart at the same time to taxi share – which helps keep costs and carbon emissions down. Why not consider car share, too? Most guests who drive come alone or with a friend; we have WhatsApp groups that, if you like, you can see who is driving from your area and enjoy getting to know each other on the way to the retreats, and save on your carbon emissions at the same time!

We are by no means saints when it comes to producing carbon, as a travel company we know this is very difficult to reduce. We are working to reduce our carbon output each year by measuring it and then creating plans to reduce it. We are reviewing all our venues and asking them how they can improve their carbon reduction as we don’t own any of our venues but we would like to work with them to help in any way we can. We want to be transparent with this, so please get in touch for more information. As we change things, we will update the website.