Why Most “Sustainable Travel” Brands Are Forgettable—And How to Cut Through
You probably saw it the weeks leading up to Earth Day: Platforms and inboxes filling up with tourism brands pledging their commitment to sustainability and community impact. Search ‘sustainable travel’ on LinkedIn any other day, too, and you’ll find these phrases.
“From sustainable to regenerative.””
Thoughtful initiatives that protect and preserve.”
“Environmental stewardship and community empowerment.”
“Travel as a force for good”.
“Leaving a place better off than it was.
According to whom?
I could mix those phrases across the multiple posts or travel press releases that land in my inbox and one would never know the difference.
After more than 15 years of interviewing hundreds of tourism executives, founders, and small business leaders on the ground — for Skift, Bloomberg, BBC Travel, or for my guidebooks — as well as sifting through hundreds of press releases, I’ve learned this: even the people doing meaningful work in the industry will get passed over because they also rely on jargon.
In my years as a reporter, I’ve tossed aside countless pitches for narratives that were indistinguishable from everyone else’s. Same words, same angle, same invisibility. And if you’re not in the media, more buyers don’t know you exist. Your opportunities shrink, too.
Executives and business owners genuinely committed to using tourism to drive economic impact on the ground? Most of them defer to what feels safe. Then they wonder why they hit send or publish content and hear crickets. Or they get published in not-as-reputable outlets because the rigorous ones couldn’t find a reason to care.
Let me show you what this actually looks like in reality.
The Story Audit
Recently, I sat down with a CEO of an adventure company for our first coaching session. She’d built a company from the ground up, establishing long-term business relationships with small businesses, including an Indigenous community. Guests were housed in locals’ unoccupied vacation homes during winter, in an uncrowded destination.
Before we started, I audited her existing narrative — her recent press coverage, media quotes and social content.
What I found were quotes like these, pulled straight from published articles she’d been featured in.
“These experiences go beyond traditional travel to provide something truly transformative, all while maintaining our commitment to sustainability and community impact.”
And another:”Sustainability and mindfulness are in our DNA.”
When I pulled these up during our session and asked her to read them back, she paused and put her hands on her cheeks. “Oh my God… the PR team sent me those — I approved them.”
How You End Up Invisible
It’s not that my client was careless—she was just too busy. Years of building companies for others as well as her own, from managing operations and leading teams to making the thousand small decisions a day that running a tourism business demands. PR sent her language. It sounded professional. It sounded like what conscious travel companies are supposed to say. She approved it on autopilot and moved on.
Most brand leaders I work with in conscious travel or whom I’ve interviewed —are operating inside a system that quietly insists: this is what sells, this is what sounds responsible, this is what the market expects.
But when everyone uses the same words, the words stop doing any work. A CEO saying “we’re committed to sustainability and community impact” is blending in. She’s interchangeable with every other tourism company trying to say the same thing to the same audience. And the leaders doing the actual work — the ones with rare perspectives, hard-won experience, real differentiation — disappear into that noise, too.
Here’s the kicker: the CEO I worked with had a background most people in adventure travel don’t have. She’d built a company from nothing. She’d worked across multiple continents. She’d survived things most people never talk about publicly. She brings a perspective to the industry that is genuinely rare. But none of that was in her quotes. None of it was in her bio either. She’d been saying what she thought she was supposed to say for so long she’d forgotten there was another option.
What You’re Avoiding Saying
I asked her a question I ask everyone I work with: what are you not saying about why you do your work, that’s actually the most interesting part?
She got quiet and then started sharing—not in press-release language this time, but in her own voice. About why she’d built the company the way she had. About the specific things she’d learned working in different countries that contradicted the industry consensus. About the gap she was trying to close. About her background — the parts she’d been treating as “personal” and therefore not relevant to her “professional” narrative, even though those two things were the same thing the whole time.
That was her real story. The actual, specific, lived version of why her company existed and why it was different. A successful CEO, doing meaningful work, needed help to remember who she was and how to talk about it. That’s probably what’s happening to you too.
Three months later, she received news that she won a leadership award that we submitted her for—after she realized she was hiding and we started telling her actual story, the industry couldn’t ignore her.
Why PR Defaults to Jargon
My theory is that PR uses jargon because it avoids scrutiny. “Sustainability is in our DNA” cannot be disproved. “We prevented 150 tonnes of CO2 annually across the portfolio” can be verified — and therefore challenged.
Generic language protects the brand from prying eyes, while specific language exposes it. When a PR team defaults to “committed to community impact,” they’re being self-protective. But an experienced journalist will spot vague language.
You can’t have it both ways. The specificity that makes you visible is the same specificity that makes you accountable. Leaders who want the first without the second end up stuck in the sea of sameness — wondering why their work isn’t landing while their PR team keeps them defensively bland.
The leaders who cut through are the ones willing to trade safety for visibility. That’s the actual work. Getting comfortable with the exposure that specific words create.
Why Your Language Costs You
The invisibility that follows from using jargon and generic ways to speak about your work in conscious tourism has concrete business consequences.
For one, journalists at reputable outlets can’t use your quotes. I’ve been on the receiving end of this all too often as a reporter. An interviewee saying or writing “we’re committed to regenerative tourism and community empowerment,” for example won’t make it in the story. The editor will cut it because it doesn’t say anything. Or we’ll find ways to ask and show you’re not what you say (even worse).
Travelers don’t convert. When a potential guest is comparing five eco-lodges, the ones describing themselves in specifics — named rivers, named partners, specific practices, measurable outcomes — convert at meaningfully higher rates than the ones describing themselves in sustainability-speak. Buyers choose the brand that sounds like a person over the brand that sounds like a mission statement.
And now, with AI flooding the space with infinite generic content, the cost of sounding like everyone else just went up. Jargon is making you disappear into a machine-generated ocean of identical copy faster than you can say “sustainable.” As consumers we’ve also never been more allergic to hearing the same words or turns of phrases, am I right? The only thing left that signals authenticity and credibility is the specific — the detail the machine can’t invent because only you can tell that story.
What You Can Do About It
I’m not going to hand you a framework. Frameworks are part of how we ended up here. But here are a few practices that work.
1. Audit your quotes. If those exact words could be attributed to another tourism CEO, stop using those phrases.
2. Write the version you’d say to a friend first. Then edit that. The version of your work you’d describe at dinner with someone you’re at ease with is almost always sharper than the version on your website. It sounds obvious, but it is rarely done.
3. Ask what you’re leaving out because it feels too personal, too political, or too specific. That’s almost always where your real differentiation lives. The thing that feels risky to name is usually the thing no competitor can copy, and the thing AI will never generate, because it doesn’t know it happened.
This type of introspection and language shift requires you to stop hiding behind jargon and phrases that you never came up with yourself. The specific version of who you are and what you do: that’s what draws interest, gets remembered and covered in the press and beyond. You just have to be willing to tell it.
Ready to Stop Disappearing Into the Noise?
If you want help doing this work — a real excavation of the story you’ve been avoiding telling and a path towards more visibility — that’s what I do with conscious tourism and ethical brand founders, entrepreneurs and DMOs.
Unlike generic narrative coaching, I focus on the stories that feel risky or uncomfortable to tell but are important because they’re the ones no one else can replicate. I help you excavate what you’ve been leaving out of your professional narrative—the background, the contradictions, the lived experience—and translate it into language that actually converts with journalists, buyers and your audience.
My new 7-day Narrative & Visibility Sprint will open up in the next couple of weeks—at a one-time beta price for the next five clients. It’s a focused, 1:1 process with me: just two calls you’ll join, plus a content and quote audit by me, and a rebuilt narrative in a document you get to keep moving forward.
It’s built specifically for excavating the narrative that you’ve been avoiding and positioning you as the specific, credible voice your audience is actually looking for.
Join the waitlist and I’ll send you details the moment it opens this spring.
