Could you go one year without taking a flight? Anna Hughes on Flight Free travel

Over 10,000 people have already said yes to a Flight Free year

Flight Free UK is a charity that encourages people to travel without flying. Over 10,000 people have already taken part in the pledge to go flight free for a year for the sake of the climate and for their own benefit as travellers. We’re fortunate to be partnering with Flight Free UK to encourage skiers and snowboarders to swap plane for train for their snow holidays this winter. Here we talk to Anna Hughes, founder of Flight Free UK, an environmental campaigner, author and cyclist. We find out why taking one pledge is such a positive and important move for the environment.

What was your driving mission when you created Flight Free UK?

I set up Flight Free UK six years ago as a response to the climate crisis. I personally hadn’t flown for more than 10 years because of the extremely high emissions of taking a flight, so I knew that not flying doesn’t mean you have to stop travelling and exploring. At the time (the end of 2018) there was growing awareness of how urgent the climate crisis was becoming, and lots of news stories about how it was more important than ever to take climate action, so I decided it was time to encourage lots of other people to give flight-free travel a try. Aviation is the big one!

Even if you take other measures to reduce your personal emissions, such as not eating meat, or not driving, just one flight could wipe out all the carbon savings you’ve made.

Our method of behaviour change is for people to take one year off flying as a way to reduce emissions and try the alternatives. We don’t say you can never fly again, but if people give it a try in the short term it can influence longer-term behaviours. We need to create a culture shift away from taking flights as the norm, because lots of people fly out of habit or because all their friends do. If we can show people that you don’t have to fly to go on holiday, we can start to shift the narrative.

What have been the results of the campaign? How is the Flight Free pledge helping with the long-term goal of reducing emissions?

It’s hard to say because not long after we started, Covid hit! So we don’t have accurate data about flight levels for the past few years because it’s been influenced by Covid. However, we can see that consumer behaviour is changing, and that’s shown by the increase in rail options in the last few years. Industry responds to consumer choices, so as more people choose not to fly, more alternatives are provided. A great example is night trains: there have been more routes and more companies offering sleeper trains in Europe since 2019, in response to the growing demand for flight-free travel.

In terms of our pledge, we’ve calculated that we’ve saved roughly 16,000 tonnes CO2 from people taking our pledge, which is amazing, and as more people take our flight free challenge, we will save more.

In this instance, how can individual action influence system change?

It’s quite a common narrative that there’s no point in individuals making changes because actually it’s the system that needs to change. This is a bit of a false argument, because we need both. If individuals change their behaviour en-masse (the aim of our campaign!) then industry and government are forced to respond. In the same way, we need government and industry to put measures in place to make low-carbon travel the obvious choice for more people, such as cheaper trains and taxes on aviation. We are part of the system, and sometimes our consumer choices are all we have. We can use them to show the people in charge what we’d like to see!

How does your campaign address the inequality of the climate crisis?

Aviation really epitomises the inequality of the climate crisis, because so few people around the world actually fly (around 5%), but we all suffer the harms that come from flights, which includes noise and air pollution at airports, and increased climate change emissions. The communities around the world that are least responsible for causing the climate crisis are suffering the most, and that’s never more true than with aviation. 1% of people cause 50% of aviation emissions. It’s an extremely elite activity.

Turning to your own travel experiences, how long have you been flight free and how has it changed your life?

It’s 15 years now since I was last on a plane, and I’ve done a lot of travelling since then. All of it has been in the UK and Europe, but it doesn’t mean I’m restricted in any way – you can go as far as you want if you have the time and money! This is true of flying as well – lots of people say, oh, but don’t you want to go to xxx far-away destination? My response is, sure, but even if I did fly, it’s unlikely I’d have the time and money to go to that place! Europe has got so much to offer, and there really is a lifetime of exploration right here on our doorstep.

I think quitting flying has made me a more adventurous and thoughtful traveller. Flying is so easy, it’s kind of cheating when you think about it! It’s so much more fun to take a ferry to get to Sicily, or the train to Denmark. And of course, even though it sounds like a cliché, the travel is part of the holiday.

I recently went on holiday to Lake Como, and we spent two days getting there (you can get there in one day but we wanted to savour it), and every minute on that train was part of it – it was something to be enjoyed, rather than endured. The views were constantly amazing, and when we got bored with looking out of the window we played games and ate lovely food and read our books and chatted and generally had a nice time.

Finally, you recently boarded a train to the Alps to go skiing, tell us 3 things that surprised you about your journey to Geneva by train?

I suppose this wasn’t surprising as I’ve done lots of equivalent trips before, but it really is so, so easy to get to Geneva by train. Wherever you live in the UK, it’s usually pretty easy to get to London, then it’s one train to Paris, and one train to Geneva. That’s it! The TGV (French high-speed trains) are amazing: really comfortable, spacious, and with good facilities. And if you get a double-decker, that’s the coolest thing! Lots of countries in Europe do double-decker trains, and the views from the top deck are something special.

The thing that did surprise me was how comparable it was in terms of time spent travelling for us to get to resort. After Geneva we took a local train into the Swiss Alps, and arrived up at the resort by about 5pm, having left London on the 7.30am Eurostar.

One of the people in our party used to work as a ski rep and said it’s pretty much exactly the same as flying, because even though you get to Geneva airport quicker, you have to wait around for ages for your transfer, especially as she said often they would wait for another flight to come in before they loaded up the coach and went. I know flying’s kind of exciting but if you can get to your destination in a different way, that’s better for the climate and more enjoyable for you as a traveller, why wouldn’t you do that? I think once people give it a try, and see it’s possible and also really easy, then flight-free travel will start to become the norm.

Take a train to the Alps this winter and receive a €1000 discount off your catered ski holiday in AliKats Chalet Bizet. Ready to go big on climate action? Discover more about Flight Free UK and take your Flight Free pledge here.

Image credit (final image): Photo by Robert Bye on Unsplash