We are trying to think of ways to encourage more carbon awareness, ways for Rentability.com to contribute to the fight against global warming.

We have an idea that involves creating incentives for holiday goers NOT to travel abroad when renting a holiday home, thus not contributing so heavily to their carbon footprint. The idea is to create a ‘same country’ promotional feature. In essence, if a holiday home owner/advertiser agrees to creating a special tariff for same country holiday goers (say a 10% discount, or an optional percentage over say 5% or something if they want to give more), then we provide them with extra exposure on Rentability by doing things like – showing their adverts higher up the rankings, highlighting their listing with a special graphic, including them in a ‘Show me only’ menu etc. This may encourage holiday goers to choose these properties not only because their social conscience has been stimulated by the social conscience and generosity of others, but because they’re cheaper too.

We have also talked about some kind of a ‘holiday home energy efficiency rating’ where by, when creating your listing you can choose to fill out a particular questionnaire that asks things like – do you have solar panels? geo-thermal heating? a wind turbine? a solar heated pool? then giving an energy efficiency score based on that.

What do you think? Has anyone got any other ideas for generating carbon awareness?

This sounds a really good idea. I know for us it could work well as I think I saw a figure of 86% of Swedes stay in country for their holiday. Our property is also modern and very energy efficient with its own water well, triple glazing, high insulation levels etc. It also somewhat counterbalances the whole ‘I had to fly there crabon footprint’ issue too. Look forward to hearng more.

Hi Steve, We’ve actually been thinking about this question quite a bit in the last week or two – I think we have a couple of concrete ideas now about what we can do, but we really need the opinions of concerned property owners to work out the details.

One idea we have is to score properties based on their ecological credentials. The visitors to the website will then be able to order their search results by this eco score. In practice this would mean that a visitor to the site would probably drill down to the region of the world they’re interested in (say, the Aquitaine region of France) and then choose to order the results by this score – the most ecologically friendly properties would then appear at the top of the list. Particularly high scoring properties would get a special icon next to their property in the search results too.

The way we plan to implement this is to create a category of “Feature” for the purpose – each of the features in the category would have a score assigned to it and the total score for the property would be the sum of its features. Presumably features would include things like carbon offsetting schemes, energy efficiency features, environmentally friendly swimming pool filtration systems etc. In order to make this work we’ll need the opinions of property owners to come up with a good list of features, and to decide on the relative scores for each of them. Would you be interested in joining in this discussion ?

The main drawback to the idea (and it’s a fairly important one) is that it doesn’t reward the absence of something – it’s a lot more environmentally friendly not to have a swimming pool at all, for instance, than to have one with an environmentally friendly filtration system. I’m not yet sure how to resolve this problem, but I’m open to any suggestions.

How about negative scores for environmentally unfriendly features?

I think this is a great idea. We are in the process of having our carbon footprint calculated (if that is the right word). We are also pushing to get people to use the train for the journey from the UK to Bavaria. I would rather see that encouraged than trying to encourage people to holiday in their own country, which would, after all be counterproductive for most of us!

Great idea to encourage us all to be environmentally freindly – everyones at it. Alistair sawday is about to publish a guide to green places to stay. We are going to re cast our profile accordingly and have all sorts of initiatives. Would welcome a sort based on a ‘green’ score . However, I agree with Margaret, your main client base relies on people travelling abroad – I wouldnt go for the ‘holiday at home’ route if you want to keep us!

Not such a good idea for some of us renting in countries other than our own. For instance, we live and rent in Italy, but don’t especailly cater to the Italian market, nor do we especially want to, thus we wouldn’t benefit from this new idea.

Not such a good idea for people who let in a foreign country as I do, and cannot converse with potential guests in their mother tongue.