What does sustainable travel mean? It is all about understanding and reducing the social, economic, and environmental impact while touring the world. At YouMap we support it by giving tips on it and connecting fellow sustainable travelers. In this article, we explain how we do it in more detail and how you can improve the sustainability of your travels by using our app – we encourage you to read on!

What Does Sustainable Travel Mean?

Although usually associated with ecology, sustainable travel means being aware of the social, economic, cultural, and environmental impact of your travels and conducting them in a way that minimizes your negative effect on the local environment, communities, and culture.

Sustainable travel starts at the beginning of your journey with the choice of transportation and accommodation. However, when fully embraced, it affects all aspects of your trips – from reducing waste to supporting local economics by choosing locally-owned restaurants.

How YouMap Supports Mindful Travel?

Knowing the definition, you probably wonder: how can a mapping app support sustainability in travel? Well, we’ve found a few ways.

sustainable travel

Promoting Sustainable Outdoor Activities

First of all, we promote visiting locally owned attractions, the hidden gems of each destination – as you can often see on our travel blog. To add to that, we also support you with tips on the best sustainable travel practices in our app.

Connecting Sustainability-Aware People

YouMap is more than just maps – it’s a social platform that lets you exchange information, views, and opinions and interact with other users’ maps. As a result, you can connect through our app with environmentally and socially aware people from around the world and exchange tips and experiences on sustainable travel.

Add to that that you can create interactive sustainable travel maps and access similar ones prepared by other users, and you can use YouMap as your source of information. After all, it’s difficult to research all the attractions and diners in a given destination on your own, and with dedicated sustainable travel maps, you don’t have to do it!

Supporting Local Businesses

We embrace the principles of World Tourism Day, and we understand the impact of tourism on the local economy of each destination, underlined by this holiday. Thus, we offer many functions in our app for business owners – they can use them to promote their restaurants, stores, or hotels locally. As a result, they make their businesses more visible to tourists and help them stand out among their corporate competition.

This is particularly important since you, as the end user, don’t need to have our app to see the results – you just need to click a link to a map prepared by one of such businesses. This means that anyone can see such maps, and local businesses truly get an opportunity to reach out to wider audiences.

Supporting Conservation Initiatives

Finally, we support conservation initiatives. We’re tourists ourselves, and we want to embrace the beauty of our planet and let our children and grandchildren do so as well. But we also understand that we all need to take action to make this happen, hence our support.

The Takeaway

International sustainable travel might require some self-sacrifices, but it is worth it – otherwise, many of the wonderful places that we visit nowadays may disappear in the near future. Remember that sustainability isn’t only about the environment – local economies and cultures are as important, so make sure to support them.

Did you like this article? You may also read: Slow travel: What Is It?