natural selection

Company name : Natural Selection Travel
Location : Botswana, Namibia, South Africa
Business sector : Safari operator
Certification : Carbon Neutral +


Natural Selection Travel is one of the leading safari operators in Africa, with a collection of around 20 very high quality lodges in the prime wilderness areas of Botswana and Namibia.

The company was founded in 2016 by Colin Bell and Dave van Smeerdijk, both of whom have absolutely vast amount of experience in the safari world.

Central to vision for the company is that it reflects their core personal values in every way, with environmental issues taking centre stage.

Dave : ”As safari operators, the responsibility of looking after vast tracts of pristine wilderness has always been something we’ve taken really seriously. Conservation is the main reason we got into this game in the first place. But in recent years we’ve realised we need to lift our horizons and start doing our part to look after the rest of the planet too. These safari areas can’t exist in a bubble, they’re part of an interconnected world.

”That’s when we started looking into the possibilities of going carbon neutral by offsetting our carbon footprint. After all, if a conservation company like ours doesn’t do the right thing for the environment, then who will?”

“Choosing to work with squestr was a complete no-brainer. We’ve known with these guys personally for decades, we understand their passion, we appreciate their integrity and we love what they’re doing with their tree-planting projects.”

Certification process

When advising Natural Selection on which type of carbon certification would be best suited for their particular circumstances, we started by looking at their central overhead, the central part of the business that is not related to the direct production of their product.

Although Natural Selection is a good sized company with over 400 employees, its central overhead is unusually low. When we ran our calculations it turned out to represent less than 5% of the total carbon footprint.

This meant that the company was easily able to afford to offset this indirect footprint, enabling them to achieve Carbon Neutral certification.

Clearly this was a good first step and a real endorsement of the efficiency of the company structure, but offsetting less than 5% of the total carbon footprint was clearly not going to be enough to satisfy their ambitions.

We next turned our attention on the direct overhead, the greater than 95% share of the carbon footprint that can be attributed to the delivery of their accommodation and travel products.

The most important realisation in this area was that Natural Selection sells almost all of its product through a network of specialist travel agents.

In this situation we almost always recommend that the carbon offsetting of the product is done at the agent level, where customers can be provided with a carbon surcharge option that would offset their whole trip, not just the parts that involve Natural Selection.

The obvious next step was to figure out what proportion of these agents were actually offering carbon offsetting. After a little investigative work, it became clear that, whilst every single company had considered it, only 20% of agents were actively offering carbon offsets.

Natural Selection were then left with a choice. Either they could add carbon surcharges directly to their product (either compulsory or optional), or we could try to get the agents signed up to provide offsets. We decided to first try the second route.

This process is still ongoing, but we are gradually getting the agents signed up to offer carbon offsets.

Once we reach the point where more than 80% of the Natural Selection product is being sold through agents who are applying a suitable carbon surcharge, then we will be able to upgrade the certification level from Carbon Neutral to the very top level of Carbon Free.

If we can’t reach that threshold, then we will look at other routes towards Carbon Free, most likely adding surcharges from which agents who are also applying surcharges can opt-out, in order to avoid double charging.

Natural Selection are intending to take advantage of their carbon certification by combining it into their marketing material, as an integral part of their mission statement. It is anticipated that this will help increase demand for their safaris, whilst simultaneously driving further brand loyalty, brand empathy and price flexibility.

We also continue to work with Natural Selection to consistently reduce their carbon emissions.

Feedback

“For a top safari company, it’s not enough to simply deliver superb safari experiences to our guests. We also have an inbuilt moral responsibility for the integrity of the wild landscapes in which we operate, to the rural communities from which we attract our camp staff and to the wider planet on which we all live. Our guests expect this of us and we expect it of ourselves.

“For years we tinkered with taking action on carbon, but never really got properly stuck in. When squestr came along, everything changed.

“We’re very lucky to have long experience of working with these guys over the years, collaborating on various strategic issues in the safari world. So we inherently knew we could trust them to to a really proper job.

“I strongly suspect that if we’d worked with another company, they’d have tried to get us to implement carbon surcharges on our product. The smart way that they recommend we get our agents to do that instead makes sense on every level. The fact that they then took it upon themselves to contact our key agents and make it happen is extraordinary, they really got their sleeves rolled up and got on with it.

”I’m sure that, whatever sector your business operates in, squestr will come up with the best strategy for you. My advice would be to give them as much rope as you can, they’re smart guys and should be able to really help your business move ahead. They certainly helped us get this done with absolutely no fuss, they basically did the whole thing for us. And it cost us a whole lot less than we feared.”

Dave van Smeerdijk
CEO, Natural Selection Travel

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