How Can a Travel Company Be a B Corp?
Travel is one of the most powerful and joyful things we choose to spend our time and money on. Not only does it shape how we see the world, but it opens up an abundance of new people, new experiences, and new perspectives. The impact it can have is, in short, life-changing.
But we can’t talk about travel without talking about the other impact it has. Flights, accommodation, food systems, local infrastructure – every trip leaves a footprint. And as the travel industry grows, so does the responsibility to seek answers about how travel and tourism really benefit the countries we visit.
So what does it mean for a travel company to operate responsibly? And how can a business built on travel, movement and consumption of this beautiful world be a B Corp?
First Things First: What is a B Corp?
If you’ve ever wondered what the B in B Corp stands for, it’s benefit. The B Corp certification, put simply, is a legal and operational framework that requires a company to benefit people and planet, as well as profit.
People
This part refers to how a company treats any and all of those it interacts with – its employees, partners, suppliers and customers. It means the company prioritises fair pay, healthy working conditions, and long-term relationships that are partnerships versus purely transactions. For a travel company, this is partnerships with local guides, accommodation partners and the smaller local-run businesses based in the communities we visit.
Planet
This pillar is about understanding our footprint and actively working to reduce it. It focuses on environmental responsibility, and includes measuring carbon impact, reducing waste, choosing local suppliers, and designing operations that minimise any harm to the environment.
Profit
This pillar recognises that businesses must be financially viable – but not at any and all cost. Profit for a B Corp-certified business is always balanced with purpose. Financial success becomes a means of sustaining impact and ensuring the business can operate responsibly over the long term.
To become certified, a business must meet the highest standards across these pillars in governance, environmental impact, community contribution and employee wellbeing. It is independently assessed, regularly reviewed, and embedded into how the company operates. Living and breathing the B Corp standards is essential to maintaining the certification.
The Challenge with Travel
Before mass tourism and low-cost airlines, travel was slower, and far less frequent. The democratisation of travel has undoubtedly brought enormous benefits – from cultural exchange and economic opportunity to, of course, accessibility for many people the world over. But the sheer volume of it has also created a pressure that many destinations struggle to absorb.
We’ve seen firsthand how local communities rely heavily on tourism income. But at the same time, it’s evident how easily over-tourism can strain infrastructure, inflate prices, and damage the very environments people travel to experience. Ski resorts are now producing artificial snow, coastal towns are overwhelmed in peak season, and the cost of living in popular tourist spots is beyond the reach of their residents. You only have to look to the recent protests in Spain’s Canary Islands to see the impact – locals have seen their living costs skyrocket alongside housing shortages due to more and more properties being converted to holiday lets.
The power of travel lies in the power to educate, transform and change the perspective of the traveller. And for that reason, instead of giving it up or reducing it, we want to manage its impact.
Beyond transport and how you get to a destination, travel is about a multitude of decisions that you might not initially think about: where you stay, who the local businesses employ, how food is sourced, how waste is handled, and how experiences are structured.
Two trips to the same place can have completely different effects on the local communities depending on those decisions.
That’s where responsibility comes in. A travel company cannot control all of these variables, but it can control how a trip is designed and who it works with. It chooses partners, sets standards, and decides how to do business in a way that is sensible rather than extractive.
Whilst being a B Corp doesn’t remove the impact of travel, it embeds responsibility and accountability around all decisions, ensuring that they are considered, measured, reviewed, and held to a standard that goes beyond profit alone.
What Being a B Corp Means For Travellers
If you’re travelling with a company that is B Corp certified, you have access to something unique that not all travellers benefit from: clarity. You have a transparent view of where your money is being spent, and how decisions are made. You know that the company organising your trip has been independently assessed against standards that go beyond marketing claims.
You can be confident that the business has put in the work to examine its supply chain, partnerships, and environmental footprint, and has measured its impact across all of these.
It doesn’t mean every element of your trip is impact-free, but it does mean that those designing it are accountable for the impact that does exist and are always actively working to manage and, where possible, reduce it.
What difference the B Corp Certification made for More Life Adventures
For More Life Adventures, the B Corp certification process was twofold:
Measuring our impact on the environment
After consulting with a number of specialists, it was clear that the environmental impact of our retreats was largely due to our travel emissions, so we began by measuring those specifically. Measuring gave us a different perspective:
How many times do we need to travel by plane? Can we travel by train instead, thus reducing our emissions by 90%?
Can we stay at each location longer than simply one retreat, thereby reducing the back-and-forth trips?
Can we bunch road trips into group transfers?
The answer to all of these questions is of course yes, and we are actively doing so. However scaling a business means scaling the number of retreats we offer, which increases our total emissions. To ensure we are not increasing our emissions unnecessarily, we are working to reduce our travel emissions per retreat, for instance by having hosts stay in Crete for two retreats at a time, grouping road transfers and taking the train to Chamonix instead of air travel.
Measuring our impact on the health of our guests
Alongside this, the B Corp certification process gave us the opportunity to measure our positive impact on guests more tangibly.
Our purpose has always been, and always will be, to improve wellbeing through time in nature, movement, connection, nutrition, rest and sleep. That is what matters to us, and that is how we determine the impact we have on the guests we greet year after year.
Based on that, our retreats are structured around evidence-backed principles:
1. Time in nature improves mental health and reduces stress.
2. Movement supports physical and cognitive wellbeing.
3. The Mediterranean diet is associated with longevity and reduced disease risk.
4. Silence and sleep are essential to recovery and nervous system regulation.
These are all impact choices, all of which we design each and every retreat around. We are continually looking at how to measure this impact more rigorously – that might include how guests feel after a retreat, how their habits change, how their wellbeing improves over time, or even how their sleep scores on their wearables change during and post-retreat. The B Corp certification pushes us to move beyond anecdotes and into accountability.
On a practical level, we are also aiming to decentralise how we run our retreats. While we cannot control where our guests travel from, we can ensure that what they spend to join us supports local economies on the ground. – so working with locally owned accommodation, guides, food suppliers and practitioners to create a sustainable retreat experience that benefits everyone involved. We firmly believe that tourism income should circulate within the communities that host it.
An Ongoing Commitment
It’s worth remembering that B Corp certification is not a tick-box exercise but a collaborative consultation process on how to improve a company’s impact on people and planet. In addition, B Corp standards evolve and companies periodically need to be reassessed. This ongoing process helps us continuously refine our mission and ask how we can do better for our guests and for the places we operate in.
Travel will never be impact-free, but it can be thoughtful and incredibly impactful if done in the right way. And that will continue to be our mission, and a fundamental reason why More Life Adventures is a certified B Corp.
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