CHOOSING YOUR FLIGHT
You’ve decided the flight is necessary and picked the closest destination. Now the flight you choose can cut your carbon bumprint by a surprising amount, and the tools to find the cleaner one are quick and free.
Flight Emissions
Search on a site, like BookBetter or Google Flights, where you can see the emissions of every flight: on the same route, two flights can differ by more than double.
Example: In the image below, you can see that a London-to-New York direct economy return flight could emit 515 kg or 1,119 kg of CO2. (To put that in perspective, a sustainable annual carbon footprint, our fair share for keeping within 1.5°C, is only about 2,000 kg of CO2 each. So one return flight to New York can swallow more than half a year’s worth.)
Remember to actively ‘sort by emissions’; the default view ranks by price and convenience, not carbon. And you don’t have to second-guess which plane burns the least fuel: it is all already baked into the emissions figure, so the number does the work for you.
Here is a five-minute tutorial that shows you how.
And if someone else books for you, your employer or a travel agent, ask them to pick the lowest-emission option: the more of us who ask, the faster it becomes standard.
A Bumprints Bright Idea™:
Emissions labels should be standardised and shown by default, like calorie counts.
COMPARE
Contrails
BookBetter and Google Flights both now flag a flight’s contrail-warming potential as low, medium, or high. It’s worth checking, because contrails can roughly double a flight’s warming, and not every flight creates them.
Choosing to travel on a daytime flight, or one in the summer months, creates fewer warming contrails (Hannah – check link); those thin clouds trap the most heat at night and in winter.
AVOID
Seat
An economy seat is the low-carbon choice by a wide margin. A first-class seat creates several times the emissions of an economy seat, mostly because it takes up so much floor space: fewer passengers fit on each plane, so another aircraft is scheduled to fly the same route.
Airlines keep adding suites, showers, and lounges (Etihad’s “The Residence” fills the space of about thirty economy seats). If you want comfort, put the money saved into a nicer hotel, not a bigger seat.
FLY ECONOMY
Airline Model
Low-cost, no-frills airlines are often the most fuel-efficient because they focus on removing excess weight, maximising the passenger load, and flying point-to-point.
The catch to remember: cheap fares, propped up by tax-free jet fuel, also drive more total flying.
“NO FRILLS”
Route
Direct flights are usually cleaner because take-off and climb burn the most fuel, so every extra stop adds emissions. The exception is the very long-haul flights, where the plane has to carry so much heavy fuel, and the heavier the aircraft, the more fuel it burns; it’s a vicious circle. In this case, sometimes two connecting flights on lighter, more fuel-efficient aircraft are a better choice.
GO DIRECT
Private Jets
If you ever have the choice, don’t. Private jets are the most polluting way to fly by a wide margin, up to fourteen times the carbon per passenger of a commercial flight. Around 40% fly empty, and almost half of private-jet trips are under 500 km.
And despite the “I need it for work” defence, they’re increasingly used for holidays and second homes, and save the average user barely a couple of hours.
The only real exception is a genuine medical emergency.
RESIST
In-Flight Meals
When you book, see if you can pre-order your meal or opt out. Airlines that load only what they need carry less weight, which means they burn less fuel and also create less waste (airlines throw away around 1.4 kg of catering waste per passenger).
PLAN AHEAD
Carbon Inset/SAF
‘Inset’ is the opposite of ‘offset’: instead of paying for carbon cuts somewhere else, like tree-planting, you pay to cut emissions inside aviation itself, by funding cleaner fuel that goes into real planes.
Buying ‘Sustainable’ Aviation Fuel (SAF) from a verified third-party supplier helps reduce aviation’s reliance on fossil fuel. But SAF is no silver bullet. It isn’t carbon-free, and how clean it is depends on what it’s made from. Buying it sends a useful demand signal, but regardless of the name, it doesn’t make a flight sustainable.
When you buy it, make sure you are given a SAF certificate. BookBetter offers certified SAF with every flight booking.
CONTRIBUTE
Carbon Offset
Supporting high-quality carbon offset projects is better than doing nothing, but it will not cancel out the flight’s emissions. Do some research and only support verified carbon removal projects. The Future Friendly Fund is a trusted travel-industry option that invests in projects working on biodiversity conservation and aviation innovation.
Remember, an offset only touches the CO2, not the contrail warming, so no amount of offsetting truly undoes a flight; at best, it softens it. The only real solution available is still to fly less, fly shorter, and fly economy.
SUPPORT
Loyalty Programmes
Airline loyalty schemes are built to make you fly more, and to upgrade you into the most carbon-heavy seats. Some frequent flyers even do “mileage runs”, pointless loops flown purely to keep their status.
Watch out for “green” loyalty perks too (green tiers, or earning status by paying for sustainable fuel): they reward buying offsets or eco-products, not flying less, and pay you in miles, points or status that keep you climbing the same fly-more ladder.
If you have miles sitting in an account, one good use is to donate them to an environmental charity, like the ones in the image below. This isn’t an offset, and it won’t cancel out a flight; it’s simply a better use of your miles than a bigger seat.
And if you decide to cancel your membership altogether and want to explain why, we’ve written a short letter you can send.
A Bumprints Bright Idea™:
Airlines should rethink loyalty schemes that reward those responsible for the most carbon emissions.
DIVEST
Download a PDF version to take with you.
