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Wintersports Package Tours From UK
SaveOurSnow strongly believes that the most important thing any individual can do to help slow global warming is to reduce the global warming they generate through powering their homes, vehicles and the way they live on a day to day basis. Switch your electricity supplier to a renewable energy provider (very easy in some countries including the UK, with no increase in cost), travel by foot, bike, bus, train or as fuel efficient and less polluting a car as you can find; buy products sourced locally.
However this rule clearly extends to ski holiday travel. One report claims that a single short haul flight for one person generates as much carbon as three months driving a 1.4 litre car.
Along with many ski resorts, an increasing number of tour operators and individual accommodation providers do offer varying degrees of environmental friendliness in their operations, which you can choose to support:
Carbon Off-set Your Travel
Carbon offsetting means you pay a comparatively small extra cash payment, usually to a specialist third party company, which then spends that money to fund projects that reduce emissions of the global warming gasses made by your travel to effectively cancel out their impact. In some cases as well as making savings in greenhouse gasses, projects have wider benefits to the local communities and environment too.
There has been criticism of projects that plant trees to offset carbon emissions with doubts that the science adds up to real global warming gas reductions in the long term. However most carbon offset projects cover a wide range of positive initiatives besides tree planting.
Most of these companies offer an online calculation tool whereby they work out how much carbon your travel will generate depending on distances and allow you to pay the resulting cost to offset online with a credit card.
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Wintersports Package Tours From UK |
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Crystal ,
the only major tour operator to be CarbonNeutral® since 2003, include a carbon offset fee to make flights CarbonNeutral. Customers can opt out if they don't want to carbon offset their travel. The fee goes to carbon-saving projects around the world including solar, hydro power, and wind farms. |
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offer chalet holidays to France, they include the cost of making travel Carbon Neutral for all clients as part of the holiday cost. |
| Pen Hadow Travel |
Unique environmentally friendly adventure travel to the Arctic or Antarctic with Polar explorer Pen Hadow. Travel costs include carbon offsetting and numerous other 'green initiatives.' |
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Ski Freshtracks from the Ski Club of Great Britain offers five specific 'green' holidays with environmental or safety elements. Contact them for details. |
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Ski Beat offers chalet holidays in France. It has highly developed
e-brochure, provides ticketless travel and has an extensive green policy. It
has an interesting section on air travel on its website. Ski Beat has been awarded the maximum three stars under the AITO
responsible tourism award scheme. |
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Neilson are unconvinced about carbon offsets but take their responsibilities on climate change very seriously, with a host of measures to minimise energy use and waste both at their UK base and in their destination resorts |
| SnowYogi |
SnowYogi: Inspired by wanting a different type of skiing holiday, a yogi, a ski bum and masseuse have joined forces to create a holistic week of skiing, yoga, healthy eating and sports massage in the French Alps with maximum green credentials. |
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Peak Retreats offer self drive holidays, inclusive of ferry crossing, to about 30 unspoilt ski areas in the French Alps, they will also book rail inclusive ski trips. Travel to ski resorts creates much more CO2 than your stay in the resort itself. For UK skiers the shortest travel is to France and rail, then self drive, releases far less CO2 than flying. |
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BoardnLodge.com run a fully green chalet in La Rosiere (French Alps) that
composts waste, is renewable energy powered, saves water and power wastage,
uses local goods, bio fuels vehicles using waste oil from local restaurants
and donates a share of profits to environmental and humanitarian charities. |
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Green Ski Accommodation Providers (Chalets, Hotels etc) |
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Chill Inn Verbier offers ski holidays in a chalet with a very green ethos: |
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Whitepod offers pure pampered luxury in a hi-tec pod-tent eco-camp above Villars in the Swiss Alps. |
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A small B&B in the Italian Alps just a short trip from Turin which can be reached by train from London and other cities. The Belvedere is run on green principles and guests are encouraged to enjoy the winter environment with more environmentally aware activities including snow shoeing and cross country skiing. A member of Responsible Travel ( www.responsibletravel.com ) |
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Small tour operator Karibuni, which also runs Ski Weekender, operates a green chalet, which sleeps 40, near La Clusaz in France. The company is accredited by Climate Care for offsetting all chalet fuel costs, travel costs (airport runs and similar) and staff travel. The chalet recycles everything and has solar panels in the self-catered chalet for all water and heating. |
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| Greenest Travel To Resorts |
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RailEurope does not have any special green travel initiatives we're aware of but travelling by electrically powered train is the greenest way to get to the Alps short of cycling - which could be tricky with your skis or board down the motorway... Rail Europe have produced a video on the green credentials of their
services, to see it click here. |
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Bensbus offers low cost transfers from Grenoble airport to many major resorts in the French Alps by grouping everyone together and putting them all on one big bus ˆ more efficient and thus less CO2 emissions than car rental or taxi. |
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