I went around to see my sister today, to see if she wanted to go and buy some teabags with me, and when I arrived she was a bit upset. As we worked on the site over the last months we've all had a creeping feeling that encouraging people to take more aeroplanes doesn't feel very comfortable. Now we've launched, the fact that we're becoming part of the global tourism industry and all of the problems it can create - well, it's starting to feel more urgent. We've always holped that once we've got the basics of Rentability sorted out we could try to work on how to do some good with it - but it's really hard to know what to do. Carbon offset calculators ? Articles about cultural responsibility ? Maybe features that allow people to search for a holiday within a given carbon budget ? Maybe we could try to highlight properties that are making a particular effort in that direction. It would take an awful lot of effort, but I'd love to finally make a decent train booking system so it's as easy to book a train from here to france as it is to book a flight. I'm not sure what we should do, and I'm wary of writing a bunch of stuff and sticking a carbon calculator on the site because it just seems tokenistic.
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We've come up with at least one idea that is a move towards helping with this issue of unwittingly contributing to global carbon levels. It involves creating incentives for holiday goers not to travel abroad when renting a holiday home, thus not contributing so heavily to their carbon footprint. The idea is to create a 'same country' promotional feature. We provide the holiday home owner with extra exposure on Rentability by doing things like - showing their adverts higher up the rankings, highlighting their listing with a special graphic, including them in a 'show me only' menu etc - if they agree to creating a special tariff for same country holiday goers - say a 10% discount (or an optional percentage over say 5% or something if they want to give more). This may encourage holiday goers to choose these properties not only because their social conscience has been stimulated by the social conscience and generosity of others, but because their cheaper too. I see that there could be some issues with this, things like - not knowing for sure the country of origin of the holiday goer, or the advertiser raising their overall prices to cover the percentage discount - but these people are sad and we will find a way to beat them (or at least make it harder for them). Rentability business model is partly based on trust and good will and this will, at least in part, be an extension of that ethos.
