I grew up going to Goa every year. Beach towns were my childhood - the smell of salt, the sound of waves, the particular chaos of a place that exists to make people happy. I've been to most of the beach towns India has to offer. Who doesn't love the beach?
I still love them. But I see them differently now.
I've stood on three beaches as an adult that have changed how I think about travel. One in Cape Town. One in South East Asia. All broken in ways visitors never see.
In Cape Town, it’s absolutely amazing to see. But the plastic was visible on the shoreline, in the water, caught in the rocks. Cape Town has the highest concentration of beach plastic pollution of any city on South Africa's coast, according to research from UCT's FitzPatrick Institute. Fun fact: most of it comes from local sources, not distant nations. An estimated 15,000 to 40,000 tonnes of plastic waste leak from South Africa into the ocean every year. I was looking at a fraction of it.
In Goa, I wasn’t visiting this time as a tourist. I was working alongside waste workers, the people whose job it is to manage what tourism leaves behind. What I saw wasn't on the beach, the tourists’ photograph. It was behind it. Mountains of trash, hidden from the resorts and the Instagram posts. Collected by hand, by people earning very little, so that the experience of the place could stay beautiful for the people who had flown thousands of kilometres to enjoy it.
I had been going to Goa my whole life and had never seen that side of it. That's the point.
That image has stayed with me. The gap between what a destination looks like to a visitor and what it costs the people and ecosystems around it. That is what sustainable travel is really about. And it's bigger than the sheets.
Sustainable travel has moved beyond the towel card
The era of the linen card is over
For years, the travel industry's answer to sustainability was the towel card. Reuse your linen. Save water. Good for the environment, good for our laundry costs. That era isn't wrong, it's just insufficient.
The real environmental cost of a trip lives in places most guests never see. The carbon from the building's energy system. The water consumed per guest per night is in regions already under water stress. The waste that ends up in a landfill, or an ocean, or in the mountains behind the resort. The impact on the community living around a hotel that wasn't built for them.
Marine pollution has increased by 23% over the last five years, now affecting more than 817 animal species globally. Scientists estimate that more than half of all marine life on earth has ingested plastic and between 75 and 199 million tonnes of plastic waste currently sit in the ocean. Tourism didn't create all of this. But tourism isn't separate from it either.
Travellers want sustainable options, the data hasn't caught up yet
Travellers are ready. The data isn't.
Here's what's changing, Booking.com's 2025 research - drawing on 32,000 travellers across 34 countries and it found that 93% of global travellers say they want to make more sustainable travel choices, up from just 42% in 2016. For the first time, more than half of travellers (53%) are now conscious of tourism's impact on local communities, not just the environment.
But desire and action are different things. 67% of travellers agree that all travel booking sites should use the same sustainable certifications or labels- yet the industry remains fragmented, with no single verified standard at the point of booking.
That gap isn't a demand problem. It's a data problem.
The information exists at the property level. Hotels that take sustainability seriously already measure their carbon per room night, their water consumption per guest, their waste separation rates, and their community investment. The missing piece is the verified, standardised infrastructure to surface that information where decisions actually get made on Google, on Booking.com, on Skyscanner, at the moment someone chooses between two hotels.
Instead, what travellers currently see is a green badge that any marketing team can add to a website. No measurement behind it. No verification. No way to know whether the property earned it or just claimed it. Research from Accor, Booking.com, and the University of Surrey found that messaging claiming "eco-friendly" without specifics left travellers 46% sceptical, but clear, specific sustainability information cut that scepticism nearly in half.
Vague claims don't just mislead travellers. They punish the properties doing the real work by making their verified performance indistinguishable from a marketing claim.
The EU's 2026 Green Claims Directive will ban unverified eco-friendly labels
The regulation is catching up
From September 2026, EU law changes this. The Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive (ECGT) prohibits platforms from displaying unverified sustainability labels to EU consumers. "Eco-friendly" without independently verified evidence becomes illegal. What replaces it has to be measured, consistent, and credible.
This isn't just a European story. 73% of travellers globally want the money they spend on travel to go back to local communities, and 69% want to leave places better than when they arrived. The regulation is catching up to what travellers have been asking for a decade.
What verified sustainability data means for the future of travel
What this means for travel - and why it matters beyond compliance
This is the question we're exploring at TripGogo: how do we build sustainability data into the core of how we recommend travel, not as an add-on but as a fundamental input into every choice we surface to travellers. We don't have all the answers yet. But we think asking the right questions is where it starts.
The waste workers I met in Goa weren't waiting for regulation. They were doing the work every day, largely invisible to the people whose holidays they were sustaining.
The least the industry can do is make that work count. Build the infrastructure that makes a property's actual environmental performance visible at the point of booking. Make sustainability credentials appear where decisions are made, not buried in a CSR report nobody reads.
The properties doing the real work deserve to be found. The travellers who want to make better choices deserve the data to do it. The communities and ecosystems absorbing the cost of tourism deserve better than being hidden behind the resort.
That's the future of sustainable travel.
Not the sheets. The whole picture.
References
- University of Cape Town FitzPatrick Institute. Plastics in the Environment — Research 2024. uct.ac.za/fitzpatrick
- Chitaka, T.Y. & von Blottnitz, H. (2019). Accumulation and characteristics of plastic debris along five beaches in Cape Town. Environmental Pollution.
- Ryan, P.G. (2020). The transport and fate of marine plastics in South Africa and adjacent oceans. South African Journal of Science, 116(5-6).
- Booking.com. (2025). 10th Annual Sustainable Travel Research Report. 32,000 travellers, 34 countries. news.booking.com
- Booking.com. (2024). Sustainable Travel Report 2024. 31,550 respondents, 34 countries. news.booking.com
- Accor, Booking.com & University of Surrey. (2025). 4 Keys to Engaging Guests on Traveling More Sustainably. sustainablebrands.com
- ElectroIQ. (2025). Ocean Pollution Statistics 2024. electroiq.com
- CleanHub. (2024). How Much Plastic is in the Ocean? cleanhub.com
- European Commission. (2022). Directive on Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT). Enforcement from September 27, 2026.
- GreenKey International. (2025). Certification Criteria 2022-2026. greenkey.global
