Following our RESPONSIBLE TOURISM expert speaker meeting in January 2026 – which you can watch here – our thanks to one of our guest speakers, Anna Hughes, founder of the Flight Free UK campaign, for laying out the facts, the advice (and the challenge) for travelling more sustainably …
Anna Hughes, Flight Free UK
At Flight Free UK, we challenge people to take a year off flying to reduce emissions and try the alternatives. It’s a great way to break a habit if you’re accustomed to jumping on a flight whenever you fancy a trip abroad, and it’s fantastic for discovering other ways to travel.
For some people, going flight-free for a whole year might be easy. For others, it’s a lot harder. We have resources and tips to help you, with information on how to travel without flying, as well as inspiring stories of other people who are giving it a try.
Taking a year off flying is one of the quickest and easiest ways to reduce your emissions. Even if you take other steps to keep your emissions down, such as reducing meat intake, or installing solar panels, or not driving, just one flight could wipe out all those carbon savings. A flight to New York emits as much carbon per passenger as driving a car for a year. Multiple flights in a year quickly add up, and could completely outweigh all the other things you do in life.
But not flying doesn’t mean not travelling!
There are plenty of ways to still go on holiday, including by bus, train, bike or ferry. Taking the train across Europe can save over 90% on your emissions compared to flying, and coach or ferry have good emissions reductions too.
For budget travel …
We recommend coach companies like Flixbus, which cover a large number of UK and Europe destinations. Rail and Sail is a good option if you’re looking to travel to and from Ireland or across to the Netherlands. For train travel, using an Interrail pass nearly always saves you money, keeping your holiday at around the £250-£350 mark (rather than paying upwards of £700 if you buy the tickets separately).
When you travel without flying, it’s not just the climate that benefits. It’s a much more enriching, relaxed way to travel, with time to read, work, sleep, or just look out of the window at those fabulous views. The journey is part of the holiday – it’s a cliché, but that’s because it’s true!
A lot needs to change in order for low-carbon travel to become the norm.
There’s no tax on airline fuel for a start, which keeps air fares artificially low. We need government and industry to stop supporting airlines, and bring in measures that will make low-carbon options accessible to everyone. One way we can show we want things to change is to stop taking flights. We have power with our consumer choices when we act together. So could you be part of the growing trend away from air travel, and go flight-free this year?
Find out more about emissions savings, get ideas for your flight-free holiday, and sign up to the Flight Free Challenge at our website: www.flightfree.co.uk
