Outdoors & Sports
Changing the World Through Travel
Looking to travel the world in an eco-friendly fashion?
Check out Mañana Travel, a newly-launched, New York and Los Angeles-based online hotel listing service. The brainchild of Swedish natives Malin Möller and Lisa Orrenius, the site started in August 2016 and works with green, fair and supportive businesses around the world.
Traditionally, Sweden gets a lot of buzz for its innovative techniques, future plans and current practices for going green – this year, it was named the third greenest country in the world by the Environmental Performance Index. It comes as little surprise to learn the duo behind this eco-friendly travel site hails from Sweden.
Möller and Orrenius always had a conscious about keeping the earth green, trying to reduce how much waste they produced and supporting good causes. Both women traveled often and started to realize how wasteful each hotel stay was. What started as a commitment to look for greener alternatives while traveling, quickly snowballed in a goal to impact the travel industry all together. After more than two years of research and planning, Möller and Orrenius launched Mañana Travel.
“It took a very long time to lock down our criteria for
hotels,” Möller said. “We did a lot of research and wanted to only include hotels that make the world better instead of worse.”
To be listed on Mañana Travel’s site, hotels must meet a number of green, fair and supportive standards. Some criteria for being green include making an effort to be energy conservative, water conservative, manage waste and have ecological awareness.
“We wanted to take it a step further than just being green,” Möller said. “Our holistic approach to bettering the world means our hotels must also be fair to their employees and supportive of local needs.”
Some active efforts hotels must practice include equal and fair payment of employees, compliance with local laws and actively support local development needs and projects. Full details about criteria can be found here.
Although there are dozens of guidelines, hotels must follow to qualify, Mañana Travel doesn’t turn away from hotels who don’t meet all standards. They even have worked with hotels who might not meet any standards.
“We like to work with hotels who don’t meet our criteria to help them to become green,” Möller said. “People don’t realize how large the travel industry is and if we can get all hotels to make more eco-friendly decisions, it would change the world.”
