Top Tips: Reducing The Paper Trail Of Your Vacation.
Trees are being chopped down just to get you ready to take a vacation!
By this I mean all the bureaucracy and paperwork required to get you going in the first place - and most of it can be avoided completely or significantly reduced if you plan ahead and think about your requirements.
Don’t Forget You Passport:
Obviously this is an important document anyway, but it’s amazing how many people lose them or allow them to get stolen when travelling. What a complete waste of resources and time - let alone a complete risk to your identity.
To replace your passport involves a large form to be completed and posted off. Someone has to process this for you, usually involving more paperwork and lots of security checks that probably use energy on ’super computers’.
The passport needs to be created and glued, laminated and security marked (rendering it un-recyclable), then it needs to be posted out to you with all sorts of information sheets and nonsense.
Other Personal Documents:
This is the same as above really. If you are careless enough to lose that 30 pages travel insurance booklet - you need to get another one from your insurers - and these cost money and use resources.
Add to this your driving license, vaccination records, medical notes, hotel reservation documents and a whole load of other important pieces of paperwork that will need replacing if you mislay them. Of course many of these will be ‘free’ to you so we don’t think twice about doing them - even relying on them as a back-up if we are ‘too busy’. But they cost elsewhere.
I bet you wouldn’t be so careless if these bits of paper were all US dollars! But in effect they are - as the more documents and information packs that companies need to keep giving out - the more they will eventually charge for their replacements. Your money.
Planning The Trip Itself:
Imagine how much paper is involved in you deciding on your vacation in the first place. Some people go into the agents and pick up 3 or 4 thick travel brochures to take home. Do you return them after you have browsed for your resort? No, I bet you don’t.
Most travel companies are there to make money not save the environment. If they need to make more brochures to get your money - then that’s what they will do (but they might add a bit on to the price of their vacations to pay for them).
You can’t leave the agencies to do this for you. Can you imagine if a travel agent for company A said you could only browse their brochures but you couldn’t take them home - whereas company B gave you loads of bright shiny pictures to take away. Who are you more likely to do business with?
Same goes for the tickets - you can get them online now, so you just print of one sheet of paper and you are ready. No little folder with glued or stapled documents to faff around with.
And checking in by machine or in advance is perfect. The less staff that the airlines or ferry companies need to check your paperwork - the less pollution they have created getting to the airport or ferry terminal in the first place. The roads are then clearer around the departure terminal and your taxi can drop you at the door without you sitting in traffic!
We are all so used to things being done a certain way - and so quickly - that we sometimes need to take a second look and see what the downsides of our ‘I want it now’ lives.
Planning is the key to green travel.