New era of sustainable holiday demand imminent, Jet2 chief warns agents

Heapy confirmed Jet2 would make labels prominent on the Jet2holidays website.

"Very quickly, we’ll be able to tell whether customers are attracted to this sort of thing."

He said with Turkey’s hotels mandated to achieve these standards, they would likely appear in search results more prominently and in greater volume.

"By the end of the year, when customers do search thinking, ’I want to go for a sustainable hotel’, every hotel in Turkey will appear," he said. "Only a percentage of Spanish, Portuguese, Croatian, Maltese, etc, hotels will appear. So it’s something when this goes live, more and more hotels will want to do."

The rollout comes two years after Jet2 promised a hotel sustainability labelling scheme that would allow customers to filter accommodation by their progress on sustainability, and a hotel sustainability charter – a key pillar of its sustainability strategy.

Rivals easyJet holidays and Tui are both much further down the line, having added sustainability labelling to their hotel product last year, in August and November respectively.

Heapy reiterated the airline and operator’s aim at its 2022 conference, highlighting the growing demand for sustainable holidays as a potentially lucrative selling point.

There remains a "say/do gap", though, between consumers’ appetite for more sustainable travel options and people’s willingness to actually pay for it, Heapy warned.

"The trouble is everybody wants to go green and everybody wants to do the right thing, but only so long as it doesn’t cost them more money or inconvenience," he said.

Addressing delegates directly, he added: "I’m sure some of your customers want to go green, but if you say to them, ’it’s going to cost this, this and this, and your holiday’s not going to be £700, it’s going to be £900’, they’ll say, ’oh I’ll go green another day’."