The True Price of Travel: Sustainability, Equity and Choice

However, I think the more difficult question is whether price actually changes behaviour, and whose behaviour it changes. An additional €5 per night may be almost irrelevant to a high-income traveller, while it could matter considerably to a family travelling on a limited budget. Carbon pricing can therefore create an important distributional dilemma. If increasingly expensive travel remains easily accessible to wealthier groups while becoming less accessible to lower-income households, environmental pricing could unintentionally reinforce existing inequalities. Sustainability should not become a system in which those who can afford to pay are effectively given greater permission to pollute.

There is also a more fundamental question behind the debate: is the current scale and frequency of travel itself sustainable? Over only a few generations, international travel has shifted from something relatively exceptional to an ordinary part of life for a significant share of the population. Perhaps the discussion should therefore go beyond how we compensate for the emissions created by this level of mobility and ask whether all of that mobility can, or should, be maintained.

At the same time, simply advocating less travel ignores its economic and social consequences. Tourism and hospitality support extensive value chains and large numbers of jobs, including many positions held by people who may be particularly vulnerable to economic disruption. A significant contraction in travel would affect not only airlines and hotels, but also restaurants, tour operators, destinations, transportation providers, suppliers and local communities whose livelihoods depend on visitor expenditure. The transition itself therefore needs to be sustainable, socially and environmentally.

For me, this means that the debate cannot end with "Should we add €5 to the room rate?" Carbon pricing can be part of the solution because it makes an otherwise invisible externality visible. But its effectiveness depends on whether the additional cost is large enough to influence behaviour, who ultimately bears that cost, how the revenues are used, and what alternatives consumers and businesses have available.

Perhaps the real objective should therefore not be to make unsustainable consumption slightly more expensive, but to use pricing alongside investment, regulation and innovation to shift demand and business models towards lower-carbon forms of hospitality and mobility without making travel simply a privilege of the wealthy. That, to me, is the more difficult but also more meaningful sustainability question, and ultimately one that the EU was trying to answer with the EU Green Deal and surrounding legislation, such as the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR). You can read more about it in my previous article.