People need to flysmart â" instead of flying dumb. To flysmart travellers would need to 1. flyless and prefer the train over a plane 2. fly direct and fly with the most carbon efficient airlines â" by choosing to fly with those airlines making the biggest efforts to be reduce the pollution they cause. The traveller achieves two things a. the traveller encourages the good guys; and b. causes less pollution by their own flying 3. Travellers should also make a charitable contribution to assist others to mitigate or adapt as they deal with climate change. Carbon Philanthropy, with gift aid, rather than carbon offsetting.
To test the idea of flysmart we needed to be able to provide travellers with a flight search engine which would enable them to choose the cheapest greenest option. Hugo persuaded Global Travel Market to create the Carbon Friendly Flight Search site. Go online and try it out, or download the screen print of choices for London to Rome The engine enables travellers to choose to fly with the most carbon efficient carrier based on the fleet â" with more accurate data on particular routes and loadings the tool would be even more effective but we have used the best available data sets. Over the last few months 57% of users of the Carbon Friendly Flight Search have paid a premium, averaging 19%, over the cheapest flight offered by selecting to book the cheapest and greenest flight offered. Over 10,000 flight searches have been made on the site. This demonstrates that if mainstream search engines offer a choice a majority of consumers will choose a more responsible flight. More detail and links at http://haroldgoodwin.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2009/6/19/4228081.html
