The TreadRight Foundation, non-profit of world-leading travel company The Travel Corporation (TTC), is continuing its fight against single-use plastics. To highlight its respect and recognition of Earth Month, TTC has announced that its guided brands (including Trafalgar, Insight Vacations, Luxury Gold, Costsaver, Contiki, AAT Kings and Inspiring Journeys) will no longer make single-use plastic bottles available on coaches from the beginning of the 2019 operating season. These brands join sister companies Uniworld Boutique River Cruise Collection, Red Carnation Hotels and U River Cruises, which have already removed single-use plastic water bottles from their operations.

With single-use plastic water bottles no longer available on its coaches, TTC and TreadRight maintain a combined commitment to the company-wide unnecessary single-use plastics elimination initiative*, announced in June last year. This latest move is expected to reduce plastic waste across all of the brands by several hundred thousand plastic bottles per year.

“Our passionate, caring global team is unified in its total commitment to our mission to make travel matter. This means changing a number of ways we've operated in the past. This announcement marks an important next step in fulfilling our pledge to eliminate all non-essential single-use plastics across our operations by 2022,” says Brett Tollman, Chief Executive, TTC and founder of The TreadRight Foundation. “We are working with our partners on the ground to make sure guests still have access to clean drinking water and will be identifying convenient points along the way they can safely and responsibly source drinking water. We will also be continuing our active efforts to find innovative ways to remove the few remaining single-use plastics throughout our organisation's hotel properties, such as shampoo and body lotion plastic bottles.”

In addition to announcing that single-use plastic water bottles will no longer be available for purchase on all coaches, Trafalgar, Insight Vacations, Luxury Gold, Costsaver, AAT Kings and Inspiring Journeys will be eliminating  further single-use plastic items from operations by moving away from non-biodegradable name tags for guests on the brands' trips. Single-use plastic luggage tags will also be replaced with reusable, durable luggage tags.  

Contiki is trialling an innovative, long-lasting, silicone one litre water bottle, with a 300-use charcoal filter. The Contiki Cares bottle provides travellers with a compact, foldable water bottle which ensures clean, safe drinking water no matter where they are in the world. Learnings from this year's trial will be shared with other TTC brands with the long-term goal of ensuring that all travellers have a refillable water bottle to carry with them, to drive a change in habits and eliminate dependency on plastic water bottles.

Both Red Carnation Hotels and Uniworld have been long-standing supporters of the removal of single-use plastics across the brands' respective properties and ships. Single-use plastic water bottles, in addition to more than 20 everyday plastic convenience items, have been banned across all Red Carnation properties and Uniworld ships for some time now.

Further underscoring the importance of eliminating single-use plastics from our daily lives and creating a more sustainable travel industry, throughout Earth Month, TTC teams around the world will be getting involved in community clean-ups, sustainability education seminars, and volunteer projects.

The TreadRight Foundation will also be helping travellers explore more sustainably to #MakeTravelMatter with a series of videos providing tips on eliminating plastics and conserving water when travelling, as well as the Dos and Don'ts for travellers when interacting with animals. The video series will be released in the week leading up to Earth Day on 22 April. 

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Notes to Editors

*TTC committed publically to eliminating all non-essential single-use plastics across all operations by 2022, across all of its brands.

About The TreadRight Foundation

Created as a joint initiative between The Travel Corporation's (TTC) family of brands, The TreadRight Foundation is a not-for-profit working to help safeguard the planet, wildlife and people for generations to come. The Foundation's guiding principle is to encourage sustainable tourism development through conservation, leadership and support for communities. To date, TreadRight has supported some 50 sustainable tourism projects worldwide. To learn more about our past and current work at TreadRight, please visit us at TreadRight.org.