B Corps can help us travel more responsibly—but what are they?

Travel has incredible potential for good. It can boost local economies, provide much-needed funds for conservation and offer employment opportunities. But not all companies operate in a way that benefits the regions they work in, and over recent years this is an issue that’s been thrown into the spotlight.

Travellers have increasingly been seeking more responsible experiences. According to Booking.com’s 2023 Sustainable Travel Report, 76% of respondents want to travel sustainably over the next 12 months, while 2021 research by Google found that 71% of people think travel companies should offer more sustainable choices.

But while a majority of travellers want to book more responsible trips, only about a quarter do. This is known as the ‘intention gap’. Factors such as price and convenience play into this, but it can also be because travellers simply don’t know where to turn for accurate and reliable information.

The situation hasn’t been helped by tenuous sustainability claims and jargon, which have flooded brochures and social media feeds in recent years. This is where certifications come in, which try to cut through the noise by providing a badge that lets customers know a company is doing all it claims to be doing.

But, with over 100 certifications in the travel industry, even this can be tricky for consumers to navigate. Some involve rigorous checks to ensure a company does what it says, while others involve little more than box-ticking, with no ensuing verification. Some look for generic impact indicators, like recycling initiatives and workplace diversity, while others are tailored specifically to social and environmental risks and opportunities in the travel industry. Working out what each claim means can be tricky for industry experts, let alone the average traveller. Here we unpack one of the fastest growing certifications: B Corp.

Business with purpose

Founded by three friends in the US in 2006, B Lab — the not-for-profit body that certifies B Corporations — aims to help businesses have a better social and environmental impact. To help achieve this, it’s designed a process to verify if a company is acting in the best interests of people and the planet. The certification is available to any company in any sector; B Corp brands range from ethical clothing company Patagonia to ice-cream maker Ben & Jerry’s. In travel, certified B Corps include hotels, tour operators and sites listing self-catering options. But what does becoming a B Corp actually involve?

Three things, in short. First, the company must score at least 80 out of 200 in an online assessment that covers governance, workers, community, environment and customers. Each answer is awarded points based on best practice. For example, if at least 40% of managers are women, a company can earn 1.03 points; if it offsets its carbon emissions, it can earn 0.48 points; and by collaborating with other businesses (for example, providing data for research or speaking at events) to help improve environmental performance, it gets 0.41 points.

Next, the company must legally commit to considering its impact on the environment and society rather than just making a profit. This is known as a ‘triple bottom line’ approach or ‘mission lock’. In some parts of the world, like the US, this requires a legal status change to a benefit corporation, which means that profit is not the only goal of the company, and that they simultaneously seek to address social, economic and environmental needs.

Elsewhere, like in the UK, companies must instead change the wording of their governance documents to declare that they hope to ‘have a material positive impact on society and the environment’. When making decisions, board members must also consider a range of aspects, including employees, suppliers, society and the environment.

Finally, every B Corp must be transparent about its impact. As a starting point, each has a profile on the B Lab website outlining how it measures up to the standards. These profiles include a report listing the answers to every question in the assessment, although most businesses don’t actively promote them.

A growing movement

As the only multi-sector environmental and social certification, B Corp is in demand. So much so that there are waiting times of up to two years for assessment. However, that hasn’t put many companies off, particularly in the UK, which is one of the fastest-growing B Corp regions globally.

Reasons for going through the B Corp process vary. Some travel companies might want to be part of a community of sustainability leaders, while others might believe it will help to sell more trips to increasingly ethical travellers. Despite the intention gap between people saying they want to book a more sustainable trip and actually doing so, there’s no doubt there’s rising awareness of social and environmental issues. In a 2023 Nielsen IQ survey, for example, data showed that 46% of consumers wanted brands to lead in creating change.

But for many companies, it’s a means of finding points that need improvement and documenting what’s been achieved. Zina Bencheikh, EMEA managing director for Intrepid Travel, says, “The B Corp process helped us to identify areas we could improve. For example, we realised we didn’t have the right gender balance among our tour leaders, so in 2019 we doubled the number of female tour leaders we worked with.”

Intrepid Travel also launched a collection of Women’s Expeditions (all-female trips led by local female guides) following the B Corp process. Other businesses say that certification has made them more transparent — for example, by telling travellers how much carbon each trip is responsible for, or producing the annual Impact Assessment highlighting work across environmental and social indicators. Every B Corp must reapply for assessment every three years, too, so becoming certified can mean embarking on a continual journey of improvement. Mike Bevens, managing director at Sawday’s, says, “When we recertified last year, we improved our score to 122.3 [out of 200]. We want to improve in our next certification.”

Much Better Adventures, a high-scoring travel B Corp, has found that becoming certified has had some other benefits, too, such as finding new like-minded suppliers. As a result, it’s now working with Chilean wildlife tour operator Birds Chile to create a new trip in Patagonia. Co-founder Sam Bruce says, “Knowing that we share an ethos for travel to be a force for good helps build a strong working relationship.”

So far, 60 travel businesses have attained B Corp status in the UK, among them Inside Travel Group, Luxury Cottages, Travel Matters, Steppes Travel and Mr & Mrs Smith. About half have joined collective Travel by B Corp to promote the B Corp badge and work more closely together. Co-chaired by Thomas Power, founder of Pura Aventura, which organises tours in Spain, Portugal and South America, and Rochelle Turner, head of sustainability at group tour operator Exodus, the community includes rail specialist Byway and the tour operator Steppes Travel, among others.

For Power, this collaboration is part of the appeal. He says, “The open, collaborative nature of the community is remarkable. We all run individual businesses, but together we can have a greater impact.” An example of this cooperation was when the group recently commissioned research from behaviour change specialist Behaviour Smart to better understand how to get travellers to choose more sustainable trips.

A complex reality

While the B Corp badge indicates that a company is trying its best to benefit the places it operates in, unpacking what it actually means for travellers booking a specific trip is a little more complicated. “Sustainable travel is nuanced,” Megan Devenish, head of adventure at Much Better Adventures, explains. “Most of a tour operator’s environmental and social impact sits in the supply chain — the businesses, people and services you choose to work with in a destination; for example, a local hiking company or a lodge. So understanding and influencing it can be a complex task.”

The B Lab assessment could be more thorough in unpicking a travel business’s impact in the places they operate — according to a report in the Financial Times, a company may commit to paying its employees a fair wage, but there are no requirements under the existing process that it should extend this further down the supply chain. That means that, for example, a company could agree to pay its employees at head office a fair wage, but it doesn’t have to consider the workers in the hotel they send travellers to, which they don’t own. Currently, profits don’t have to be reinvested back into the local communities, either.

Changing the assessment process would be a positive step in an industry where economic leakage — money seeping from local communities into the hands of international businesses — is a concern. According to the UN World Tourism Association, US$95 of every US$100 spent on tourism in the developing world leaves host countries.

According to Paul Easto, founder of Wilderness Scotland, these concerns were the reason the company avoided seeking B Corp certification. “We decided to instead channel our energy and resources into tackling issues where we could have the most impact, such as adapting our product and operations to reduce emissions or eliminating all single-use plastics and food waste on our trips.”

But certifications like B Corp have their uses. Xavier Font, professor of sustainability marketing at Surrey University, says: “What the certification provides is a seal of approval that you can probably trust what this company says because it has its house in order.”

Justin Francis, founder of Responsible Travel, agrees: “The best certifications, like B Corp, should give travellers some confidence, but none should be taken at face value. We should instead encourage travellers to be curious and actively energised instead of blindly accepting certification.” He continues: “Tourism is unique in that what is most important to address varies greatly by destination.”

Examples of this can be found worldwide. For example, water conservation is a pressing issue for hotels in Cape Town, where drought is commonplace, whereas protecting mangrove forests is a priority in Indonesia, where coastal erosion puts local communities at risk. This context is difficult to address in a standardised certification like B Corp.

Rochelle Turner, head of sustainability at Exodus, acknowledges this: “There are some other certifications that are specific to tourism and therefore more aligned to it, like The Long Run’s Global Ecosphere Retreats standard and other Global Sustainable Tourism Council-recognised certifications.”

These tend to drill a little deeper into a business’s impact by asking more questions about, for example, its choice of suppliers and the social and environmental risks and opportunities in the destination they send travellers to. Being accessible is a strength of B Corp, creating wider awareness and uptake, but also a potential weakness, diluting what it ultimately means.

B Lab is attempting to address this criticism. The assessment process is currently under review by its Standards Advisory Council (which includes a mix of businesses, independent experts and government bodies) and is open for public consultation. The exact date is yet to be announced, but the first updates are expected to be available later this year and include a shift from the flexible 80-point system to requiring every company to meet minimum standards across multiple issues, such as fair wages and environmental stewardship. This commitment to continual improvement certainly provides hope in the imperfect world of sustainability stamps. Whether B Corp and other certifications can improve quickly enough to meet the increasing scrutiny of savvy consumers and shifting regulation remains to be seen, but in the meantime, as Thomas Power puts it, “It sounds grandiose, but if we all spend our money with B Corp-type businesses, then our world is likely to be a better place to live.”