Sustainability

Sustainability Policy

Working openly on our footprint

How we manage the environmental and social footprint of our advisory work, our events and our use of artificial intelligence, and what we are building next. Published so that the organisations we work with can see exactly where we stand, and reviewed annually.

01

Our approach

The Digital Tourism Think Tank works with Destination Marketing and Management Organisations on digital transformation and artificial intelligence. Our footprint is that of a small, remote-first knowledge organisation: travel to clients and events, the running of three annual programmes, digital infrastructure and the energy consumed by the artificial intelligence tools we use daily.

This policy is written and published by us, and we hold ourselves to the same standard we bring to the destinations we advise: every commitment on this page has a working mechanism behind it, and where something is still being built, we say when it arrives. The policy is reviewed annually and each revision reports progress against the last.

02

Travel and delivery

Travel is the largest part of our footprint, so it carries our firmest working rules.

Remote first. Every engagement we offer can be delivered remotely, and remote delivery is priced identically to delivery in person, so there is never a commercial incentive on either side to travel when a screen would serve.

One visit, several purposes. Where in-person work is the right choice, we combine engagements on a single visit wherever the calendar allows, and our fixed all-inclusive pricing means additional travel never generates additional revenue for us.

Surface travel by default. For any journey that can be made by rail or electric vehicle in under a day, surface travel is our default, and we fly on such routes only where cost, connections or timing make surface travel genuinely unworkable. The rule applies to everyone, including the leadership, and where we do fly, we fly economy.

Digital deliverables. Our proposals, reports and programme material are built as web documents, designed to be used on screen rather than printed and shipped.

03

Artificial intelligence, measured

We use artificial intelligence daily and we advise others to adopt it, so its energy cost is part of our footprint and we treat it that way. We measure and track the intensity of our own artificial intelligence use, deliverable by deliverable, a pioneering practice and to our knowledge the first of its kind in our field. The AI Environmental Impact Model that makes it possible is published as part of our open AI Transparency Framework at ai.thinkdigital.travel, released under a Creative Commons licence and free for any organisation to use, because a pioneering practice is worth more shared than held.

  • We disclose the environmental grade of our AI-assisted deliverables using the model, alongside the transparency grade we already publish.
  • We match the model to the task: lighter models for routine work, frontier models where the work genuinely requires them.
  • We teach the same discipline in our programmes, including the running cost and energy implications of agentic workflows, so the organisations we train adopt artificial intelligence with its consumption understood from the start.

The model’s grade boundaries are published and versioned, and they will strengthen as first-party data becomes available under the EU AI Act’s reporting provisions. We apply the current published version to our own work.

04

Events

We design and produce three annual programmes, and their sustainability is built into how they work rather than added afterwards.

The host partnership model uses venues, catering and production that our host destinations already operate, rather than building temporary infrastructure for a week.

Speakers come from the community, and we prioritise speakers who can arrive by sustainable means of transport. Our programmes draw their speakers from the practitioners attending, which is both the pedagogy and a materially smaller travel footprint.

Catering is vegetarian. We ask our event partners to source vegetarian meals only, one of the largest single reductions available in the carbon impact of an event, and we order precisely what is needed so that good food is eaten rather than wasted.

Signage is digital or reusable. We work without single-use banners and roll-ups, at our own events and as a request to our partners.

Sessions are recorded and materials are digital, so attendance never has to be duplicated for the sake of information.

CAMPUS is our contribution to the question itself: a unique forum built to find bold and radical solutions to the sustainability needs of the tourism industry, addressing its core structural challenges and developing a new blueprint for destination management. It is built on the principle that the landscape is the programme: strategy developed through direct engagement with place, led by local specialists.

05

Research and advocacy

Part of our contribution is upstream of our own footprint. Our research programme addresses the structural sustainability of tourism itself, including the regional dispersal of visitor demand. The Rural Tourism Renaissance study, produced with Airbnb across eight European markets, evidenced the economic significance of rural tourism and is used in policy engagement at European level. Our discoverability work helps destinations ease pressure on saturated places by acting on the information that artificial intelligence systems draw on, which is one of the few levers on dispersal a destination can pull directly.

06

People

Sustainability includes the people doing the work. We publish the AI Organisational Wellbeing Instrument within our framework, measuring what artificial intelligence adoption does to workload, confidence and team structure, and we apply it to ourselves as well as offering it to clients. Our team works flexibly and remotely by default, and we engage local expertise in the markets where we deliver.

07

Measurement, and what we are building

We record our carbon footprint informally today, and we are designing the robust methodology and infrastructure to record it properly, measure it continuously and set ambitious climate reduction goals against it. The system launches across late 2026 and 2027, beginning with the travel emissions of every delivered engagement.

We are building from a strong foundation. Our AI Transparency Framework already does for artificial intelligence exactly what sustainability reporting requires: published methodology, versioned boundaries, per-deliverable disclosure and clear treatment of what is measured against what is estimated. Our sustainability measurement follows the same architecture, because an approach that works in public is the kind we consider worth having.

We focus our effort on reductions we can make ourselves rather than on offsetting, and the next revision of this policy will report measured progress against this one.

08

Suppliers and operations

  • Our digital infrastructure is purchased from providers running on 100 per cent renewable energy.
  • We are remote by design and do not operate offices at scale. Our registered office sits within a historic tenancy where the landlord procures the energy supply, and we work with them on this as the tenancy allows.
  • We select suppliers with published environmental commitments wherever a credible option exists.