Travel without car
Ecotourism, slow travel, sustainable travel… all these expressions represent the tourism of the futur, the tourism in which Edd Hostel wants to be a committed actor.
Our carbon footprint
In this approach, we wish to verify our efficiency. We accessed – thanks to Karbon Ethic – to a file that allowed us to calculate our carbon footprint.
Without getting into too much details, we clearly have 3 categories that have a big impact on our consumption. By order of importance:
- The way our clients are arriving – plane, car, train…
- Our furniture and materials/ we have 400m2 for 50 beds – yes! All spaces are shared.
- The laundry – we are cleaning sheets, towels… after each clients.
Since the start of our project, we made choices and set up ecological actions, that’s why we have these 3 categories that stand out in our building. However, generally in hotel, if we generalize, impactful categories are: food waste, the use of unique products (shampoo, slippers, etc.) overuse of the printer, water, etc.
Be reassure, we are far from perfect, that’s why we set up projects and gestures for for the year 2021 in order to reduce our consumption. As you may have notice, one of the category isn’t under our control. That is how the travellers are choosing to come and travel to the Edd Hostel. This category representer more than 60% of our impact in 2020.
The ecotourisme isn’t sustainable gestures put in place by the accomodations, it’s also and mainly an upstream thinking on the way travellers are arriving and exploring within a region. By the way, a report of the ADEME (agency of ecological transition), highlights this reflexion:
“Tourism generates important flows of people towards and from touristic territories, but also within these territories. The emissions of greenhouse gas linked to the transportations are particularly important. Travels that are consequently growing these last yers, are long distances travels (more tan 80km from the domicile), linked in big majority to tourism and hobbies. The travels by individual cars are always the standard of the majority of people’s travels. Facing the rarefaction of fossil fuels, to the impact of the emissions of greenhouse gas and the financial cost, tomorrow’s travels are going to act as a break from vacations.”
What we can do from our small scale, is to convince and communicate about the ecotourism as for your next travels in our place (or elsewhere), you will take the time to consider whether you really need your car to fully enjoy your holidays. To convince you, we couldn’t find anything better but to tell you about our values and how Edd Hostel was created.
Travel without car
We know that nowadays cars are the favorite transportation for travels. Beyond its abusive use on the environment and the landscape qualitu, its predominance also goes agains our personal commitments, that’s why we placed this criteria at the heart of our concept.
The idea of Edd Hostel was therefore based on the tourism with cars. Convinced that the futur will be without cars, our tourist offer should then adapt and offer solutions to travellers forerunners of sustainable tourisme. At the very beginning of the project, we had no idea where to settle in brittany. When searching for the ideal location for “travelling without car”, we found Dol de Bretagne. Yes yes, tht’s right, we never heard about this town before our project.
The story of Edd Hostel starts while looking at the map and specially its rail network. We noticed that Dol de Bretagne allowed to travel within 30min by train or bus towards the Mont Saint-Michel, Dinan and Saint-Malo. Furthermore, Dol de Bretagne is a TGV train station and allows to reach Paris in only 2h30. Dol de Bretagne is a small town of 5000 inhabitants and that makes another reason for us to like this idea! During summer, our major destinations are often saturated and the idea to be away from the crowd while being at the center of the jewels made us really happy.
Soft mobility
Let’s dig a bit more this subject of the localisation as ecotourism is also about soft mobilities like bicycle, walks or riding horses. Once more, this medieval town resonates with our values. The green way (Voie Verte in french) and the GR34 are 5minutes walk from the Cathedral. While using soft transportations, it is therefore possible to visit the Mont Saint-Michel from Dol de Bretagne.
Dol has us in its pocket! Expert of travels without cars, we are rapidly constating that while adding to the famous tourists destinations that we mentioned earlier, it is possible while inflecting soft transportations to explore Dinard by boat from Saint-Malo or Cancale and all the Emerald Coast by using local buses.
Ecotourism
That’s right, we found the ideal place to visit the North of brittany without car!
We love to travel and we were lucky to travel a lot in our life, so we are not here to lecture you as we are not the most perfect example to follow! However, we believe that for steps, weekends and some holidays, we need ot think about our tourist mobility and privilege it without cars even if that means to have a different organisation.
Once you are at your accomodation, it’s now our responsibility as host, to control our carbon footprint. But this point is going to be developed in another article when we are going to do our balance of our 3years consumption, and what we need to do. We can still tell you that we joined the association ATD “Acteur du Tourisme Durable” (Actor of Sustainable Tourisme).
Meanwhile, we can’t wait to welcome you at Dol’s train station!
Reference websites:
In: Full day trip