Company Lets You Choose Holiday Brochure Pages

At one time you would run down to your local travel agent in March and come back armed with so many holiday brochures it would take you until the end of the summer to read through them.

That has slipped away over the last couple of decades, at first as tour operators wanted to reduce overheads on these often wasted holiday magazines, and now at least one company is seeking to do away with them to reduce their carbon footprint.

i-to-i is a holiday company that specialises in volunteering type holidays.

People who take trips with this company may perform educational work in Tanzania, elephant care in Sri Lanka, building projects in Costa Rica, or maybe wallaby rehab in Australia.

The problem is that the company sends out around 130,000 brochures to potential volunteer vacationers. This is the equivalent of 20 million pages of often unread material.

They have decided to take the plunge and move their offerings online, not exactly a new approach, but they do have a twist.

They appreciate that just like the Sunday morning newspaper, many people just have to have their dream holiday plans in their hands.

So they have decided that potential clients can order the hardcopy version to be sent to them by post.

Again not that unusual, the difference is that they want customers to select the pages or countries that they want to read about.

The company will then have those pages printed and sent out to them, saving the financial and environmental costs of printing and sending out the full brochure.

If it works, the company wants to charge for the printing and donate the cash generated to the projects they are involved in.

They surveyed customers before initiating the scheme and discovered that a massive 96% could live without the paper version.

Each year the UK holiday industry produces 100 million brochures. That’s an awful lot of trees and “get you high” toxic inks.

ABTA says that on average it takes five brochures to sell one holiday, that’s 80 million wasted magazines each year.