October 22nd - Is there really a future in "Green Travel?"
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 22 October 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
My guest today is Richard Hammond, founder of Green Traveller – an organisation that aims to provide news and inspiration about lower-carbon holidays. We're talking at a time when the Berlin-Paris sleeper train is about to come to a shuddering halt. But Richard says competition between rail firms can lead to the kind of growth we saw with low-cost airlines. And we bonded with our mutual fondness for FlixBus.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, in the company of |
| 0:06.6 | Richard Hammond, the founder and videographer for Green Travel. Tell us about this interesting |
| 0:15.1 | organisation, Richard. Well, Green Traveller is a couple of things, really. First and foremost, it's a media production agency, |
| 0:22.3 | and we produce an online magazine called The Green Traveller magazine, which is really news and information |
| 0:28.1 | and features for Travers looking to travel really in a more thoughtful and sustainable way, |
| 0:34.9 | whatever that means. And then the other side of what we do is that we produce short films about sustainable travel |
| 0:40.7 | to help inspire travellers to look for these more kind of inspirational and interesting ideas for how to travel |
| 0:47.8 | in a way that's better for the planet, which sounds a bit worthy, but in a more fun way that's a bit more thoughtful about the way that they travel. |
| 0:55.4 | I'm going to push back a little and say that everybody wants to have less of an impact on the world. |
| 1:02.7 | But honestly, it's just so much hard work trying to do the right thing. |
| 1:08.4 | For example, if you wanted to go from Manchester to Malaga, |
| 1:13.3 | it would take you about two minutes to book a flight and you might pay £100. It would take you |
| 1:20.2 | quite a lot longer to book a train trip. It would involve several transactions. It would the journey |
| 1:26.1 | itself take 48 hours perhaps. and furthermore, it would |
| 1:30.2 | cost you about five times as much. So, while with the best will in the world, green travel is just |
| 1:36.1 | beyond the reach of many people. I think it's about looking at a different way of travelling, |
| 1:41.5 | not necessarily comparing like with life. So yes, it's going to |
| 1:44.6 | take longer. I mean, generally for journeys of over six hours, it's probably going to be |
| 1:50.4 | quicker to fly if you're going to take the train. But there's a different way of travelling. If you |
| 1:54.8 | consider the journey part of the holiday, then actually becomes much more fun. And, you know, |
| 2:00.1 | recently I travelled to the French Alps with my family by bus much more fun. And, you know, recently I traveled to the French |
| 2:02.0 | Alps with my family by bus all the way. And we traveled on the Flix Bus buses. We went, we met at |
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