Green Travel

When planning a family vacation there is a lot to consider. While putting together everyone’s clothing, figuring out transportation, activities to please everyone while you’re there, and how you’re going to keep everyone happy while not breaking the bank, creating a green travel plan can easily get forgotten.

Green living is more than teaching your kids about green health products to use around the house; it is a combination of all aspects of your life combined to form an environmentally friendly individual who can calmly and optimally see the greenest way of creating green travel.

However, as we said, figuring out how to fuse green travel with your travel plans can be hard, and sometimes inconvenient for your family. If you put the time and research into the work before traveling, though, you might be surprised at how easy it can be.

Making a Green Travel Plan

Creating a plan that covers all aspects of your travel is essential to ensuring green travel. Green kid activities both in transit and at your destinations offer fun distractions for your kids.

Make sure you include the hotel, or location you are staying, into your green travel plan. Ask about their environmental policies and what they’ve done to help local customs and the local economy. Don’t forget to ask the following questions:

How do they recycle?
Do they employ local guides and leaders?
Do they have a “green” purchasing policy?
How do they minimize the effect on the environment by their walking tours in local towns and wilderness areas?
What are their energy sources?
What proportion of their revenue goes into helping the local communities or local environmental charities?

Make sure the restaurants you eat at are environmentally friendly by doing a bit of research online. Most importantly, make sure your carbon footprint during travel is as minimized as possible. Don’t drive a van if you can help it; trains, planes or boats may not advertise being “green”, but since they offer groups of people travel arrangements, they’re greener than your old beat-up car.

Benefits of Green Travel

The benefits of green travel can kind of go unsaid – it helps the environment! Startling realization! However, the real benefits of green travel go much deeper than that.

Green travel offers your family the chance to research fun, new exciting adventures that coincide with green living while offering all the wanted fun factors.
Your family can make meaningful connections, give back to the environment, and help conserve natural resources.
Offset your carbon footprint by booking specific tours, airlines, hotels, etc. and help future generations deteriorate the climate changes that our carbon outputs are negatively effecting.

Top Green Travel Destinations

The following are the best green cities to travel with your family this summer. They were determined by raw data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Geographic Society’s Green Guide, which collected survey data and government statistics for American cities of over 100,000 people in more than 30 categories, including air quality, electricity use and transportation habits.