Staycations: Should I stay or should I go?

Climate Action Fife partners Greener Kirkcaldy and Fife College teamed up to deliver Staycation: Should I stay or should I go?, for the college’s Travel and Tourism, Events and Hospitality students. This event is part of Climate Action Fife’s work to encourage Climate Friendly Travel.

In 2019, the Scottish and UK parliaments and Fife Council declared a climate emergency. By sharing our knowledge and skills in Fife, we can work together to take positive action for Fife’s future. This is what Climate Action Fife is all about. We can tackle this urgent problem together. Scotland aims to be a Net Zero Nation by 2045 and we all have a part to play.

The staycation event got students thinking about their holiday choices, why we make them, how they impact the environment and what our choices mean for the tourism industry. Like many climate issues, it can be a difficult topic to talk about.

Travelling abroad gives us so much – it connects us with other cultures, lets us experience new places, it creates a more global community and we can keep in touch with friends and families further afield. It’s also very important for creating jobs and bringing money to the economy.

But all these things come at a cost. Flying is one of the highest carbon forms of transport, each flight releases large amounts of greenhouse gases into the air from burning fossil fuels. These trap heat in earth’s atmosphere, leading to global warming.

In Scotland it can feel a bit more like ‘global weirding’. We have all seen more extreme weather, like the summer wildfires and increased storms this year in the UK and this also impacts people around the world.

Air travel is on the increase at a time when we have committed to reducing greenhouse gases – so there is lots to think about.

One of the aims of Climate Action Fife is to get more people openly discussing the climate emergency and the difficult decisions we all have to make. It’s about challenging the silence that exists around climate.

To help us have the conversation, we had an expert panel covering the themes of the attraction and barriers of holidays abroad and holidays at home. How do we balance the desire to travel with the impact of our holiday choices on the climate? And whether we should try to change our holidaying habits?

Our expert panel

Here are some of the things that our panel members shared:

Craig Leitch, Project Manager, Fife Climate Hub

People have become accustomed to air travel: cheap flights, low cost air lines. It’s more norm than novelty. When planning a holiday we automatically think of going abroad. Between clever marketing and beautiful Instagram pictures, we have forgotten other methods of travel are equally as enjoyable. In reality, 20% of people have never been on an aircraft.

The places we travel to are often those most at risk from a changing climate, such as the Great Barrier Reef. Wealthy nations can afford to protect themselves from the worse impacts of the climate emergency, poorer nations cannot. When lots of people take action together, we can influence the governments and industry around us and create change. 

Bruce Lamond, Managing Director, Travel Your World

Bruce didn’t realise until the day before, how high the carbon emissions are around air travel, in particular. Travel agents need to educate themselves more on the impacts of the holidays they are booking for clients so their clients can make informed choices.

No client has ever come into his shop and asked how they can offset their carbon footprint. Bruce says he travels a lot as he feels he can feed these experiences back to his clients and recommend certain types of holiday. His clients are far more likely to be interested in doing some carbon offsetting locally, for example planting trees to sequester carbon than invested in a wind farm on the other side of the world.

Matt Pointon, Project Manager, Levenmouth Local Tourism Association

Matt believes we need a balance between staycations in Scotland and holidays abroad. He advocates staycations and in particular bike-backing in the UK. He believes there is a place for flying to holidays abroad.

Rather than staying in all inclusive, self-contained holiday resorts we should be out boosting and supporting their local economies. We can holiday in a way that is sustainable while you are there – eating in local restaurants, hiring bikes and experiencing local cultures and customs.

Rosalyn Watson, Tourism Officer, Fife Council

There is so much to do and see in Fife – The East Neuk, St Andrews, Fife Coastal Path, the UNESCO protected Forth Rail Bridge, to name a few attractions. There is a wealth of jobs for Travel and Tourism in Scotland and in Fife in particular. Hospitality, front of house, catering and restaurants, shops and experiences. Not all Travel and Tourism students will or should only be promoting holidays abroad. Work needs to be done on Fife’s infrastructure to make it easy to choose staycations.

The event was an interesting discussion with some great questions from the 70 students who attended about their holiday choices. We look forward to working with Fife College again soon during their Tourism Takeover event.

Michelle Selbie, Development Worker (Community Engagement)