Climate Pledge · Methodology · Verifiables
This page is the granular methodology dossier behind every claim on our Impact page — formulas, partners, audit cadence and public verifiables. It exists so registries, editors and travellers can desk-review us without scheduling a call.
Our Climate Pledge
Travel is one of the planet's most carbon-intensive consumer choices. We will not pretend otherwise. The following five commitments are our standing public position, reviewed each year on 1 January and re-published on this page.
Methodology
Each gate is a yes/no test. An itinerary that fails any one of them is reworked before it reaches the guest — not after.
We compute each journey's CO₂e from four levers: flights (DEFRA 2024 emissions factors, economy class), internal transfers (rail-first; car emissions modelled by vehicle class), accommodation nights (lodge-declared energy mix where available, otherwise IEA country grid average), and tour activities (excursion-specific multipliers from GHG Protocol). The output is per-traveller kgCO₂e; the worksheet is included as a PDF appendix in every itinerary brief.
Every itinerary triggers a Tree-Nation planting equal to 1.5× the modelled footprint at species-specific sequestration rates over 25 years. The 1.5× buffer covers mortality, methodology drift and travel days we didn't model (e.g. taxi to the airport). Trees are planted in our verified Tree-Nation forest (code 275f463178ff5fda) and live-counted on this site.
≥ 70 % of an itinerary's gross spend must stay in the host community. Hotels owned by external chains, foreign-owned safari concessionaires and OTA commissions count against the threshold. Every itinerary carries an internal Community-Spend Worksheet computed at quotation time; itineraries that fail the test are reworked before they reach the guest.
Hard disqualifications, written into every vendor contract: no elephant rides, no captive-cetacean encounters, no big-cat petting, no feeding of any wild animal, no animal performances of any kind. Operators who breach this once are removed permanently from our roster. Guests are briefed pre-departure.
Mumbai office runs on the rooftop solar inverter half the working day; the remainder is offset via the same Tree-Nation pipeline. Plastic-free supply chain (refill stations, bamboo stationery, no single-use water bottles for guests). Internal transfers are rail-first unless rail adds more than 8 hours or a connection day to the guest's plan.
Site hosted on Cloudflare's renewable-powered network (Green Web Foundation directory verified). Image weight is the largest carbon line-item on a travel site — every photographic asset is served as WebP at quality 82, auto-downscaled to a max of 1100 px width, and edge-cached for 30 days. Cumulative page-weight savings since June 2026: ~19 MiB across 42 assets (78 %).
Public verifiables
Every figure below resolves to a third-party-hosted page outside our control. If a registry desk-reviews us, this is the table they read.
Partners & memberships
Reporting cadence
Quarterly
Tree-Nation planting reconciliation against booking ledger.
Half-yearly
Community-spend audit across every itinerary booked in the prior six months.
Annual
Public impact statement — published on this page and on /impact every 1 January.
On demand
Per-itinerary CO₂ worksheet shared with guest on request, free of charge.
Editors, certification bodies and curious travellers: write to info@myecotour.com and we'll send the anonymised CO₂ + community-spend Excel template we use internally. No NDA, no follow-up sequence.
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