The flagship climate initiative of the 30,000+ member Adventure Travel Trade Association – the largest global network of tour operators, lodges, and destination marketing organisations focused on adventure tourism – Tomorrow’s Air is on a mission to educate and empower travellers to support the expansion of carbon removal technologies and sustainable aviation fuel.
Differentiating the travel experience through sustainability
The initiative, launched in 2020, is a leader in enabling travel businesses and individuals to join in and support the expansion of innovations necessary to restore the Earth’s climate. In doing so, it enables its travel customers and partners to help make travel more sustainable.
Promoting climate education with travel customers
Tomorrow’s Air uses a portion of every payment received to directly fund carbon removal technologies and sustainable aviation fuel alongside educational programmes that help close the knowledge gap about climate-conscious travel practices.
This education includes custom, live training courses delivered to travel company teams, original research, awareness campaigns, the Artists for Air network, a podcast, a newsletter, and content developed for travel companies to use with their guests. The Tomorrow’s Air educational content reaches thousands of travellers every month.
Putting transparency at the forefront
For Tomorrow’s Air, trust is central to achieving success in its mission to inspire and mobilise people to support carbon removal technologies and sustainable aviation fuel. The team wanted to be sure that the travellers and businesses participating in Tomorrow’s Air had visibility into how their payments were channelled to the carbon removal and sustainable aviation fuel innovators in its portfolio.
Trust is key to our organisation as we help our travel-industry partners pursue sustainable travel strategies.
Tomorrow’s Air adds value by partnering with the most trusted, reputable suppliers — and elevating transparency helps give our customers greater visibility into their carbon removal purchases.
“Trust is key to our organisation as we help our travel-industry partners pursue sustainable travel strategies,” said Christina Beckmann, who heads up Tomorrow’s Air. “Tomorrow’s Air adds value by partnering with the most trusted, reputable suppliers — and elevating transparency helps give our customers greater visibility into their carbon removal and sustainable aviation fuel purchases.”
Navigating complex supply chains
For Tomorrow’s Air, providing supply chain visibility to its community is a key element of driving expanded awareness about the climate innovations it supports. For every payment it receives, it places a traceable order with carbon removal and/or sustainable aviation fuel providers.
Using Digital Product Passports to drive transparency
To support transparency for people using carbon removal and sustainable aviation fuel innovations, Tomorrow’s Air turned to Digital Product Passports on public ledgers powered by PicoNext.
Previously, Tomorrow’s Air issued PDF-based certificates to confirm a customer’s purchase. In order to provide updates on the progress of a customer’s order – as well as the status of their carbon removal orders – Tomorrow's Air piloted a Digital Product Passport hosted on a sustainable, power-efficient blockchain.
Tomorrow’s Air has a unique solution for travel companies that are striving for greater sustainability.
By providing transparent detail on the status of travellers’ carbon removal and sustainable aviation fuel payments, we’re not only building awareness about climate-conscious travel – we’re also aggregating a global community that’s directly chipping in to help.“Tomorrow’s Air has a unique solution for travel companies that are striving for greater sustainability,” said Jason Reckers, Chief Operating Officer of the Adventure Travel Trade Association. “By providing transparent detail on the status of travellers’ carbon removal and sustainable aviation fuel payments, we’re not only building awareness about climate-conscious travel – we’re also aggregating a global community that’s directly chipping in to help.”
Showing progress using blockchain-based updates
With a public ledger-based Digital Product Passport, Tomorrow’s Air can offer travel companies and travellers a play-by-play update on how their payment in support of climate education, carbon removal, and sustainable aviation fuel is helping restore Earth’s climate.
Giving a view into payments
The Digital Product Passport includes a tokenised representation of the carbon removal or sustainable aviation fuel payment for a particular travel business, along with blockchain-based events attached to the token that represent the status of the purchase. Tomorrow’s Air business customers and end-travellers can then view the status of these public-ledger events using a Web-based viewer provided by PicoNext.
Digital Product Passports provide transparency into complex supply chains
By its very nature, the supply chain for climate technologies like carbon removal and sustainable aviation fuel can be complex.
For example, Tomorrow’s Air uses multiple vendors to fulfil each of its travel industry customers' carbon removal purchases. For a single payment, up to three of its trusted carbon removal partners – Climeworks, Pacific Biochar, and Eion – may receive a portion of a customer’s order, and then begin work on extracting carbon from the atmosphere and transitioning it to permanent storage.
Further, the time from when the carbon removal order is placed to when the order is fulfilled (through technology scaling), can take anywhere from 12 months to seven years – making it all the more important that customers have a view of the status of their purchase.
Coordinating among different climate-focused vendors
Using a public ledger-based Digital Product Passport, Tomorrow’s Air can publish data points about carbon removal and sustainable aviation fuel purchases, updating its community on the particular attributes of the order, which vendors have responsibility, the confirmation IDs for the order, and the status of the order’s fulfilment.
To make it easy for its travel business customers to communicate this transparency to their travellers, Tomorrow’s Air provides the Digital Product Passport link to its tour operators, so they can share this direct transparency in their own communications with guests.
Capabilities usedPublic ledger advantages for carbon-focused Digital Product Passport
Public ledger blockchains are uniquely suited to communicate sustainability information as part of a Digital Product Passport. The information on a blockchain is cryptographically secure, and can’t be changed or tampered with after being written to the public ledger.
It can also be traced back to the individual that writes the update to the blockchain. In addition, for Tomorrow’s Air, a key requirement was that travellers be able to view the Digital Product Passport updates as easily as possible – without connecting a digital wallet or downloading an app.
Data independence on a blockchain
Finally, one of the reasons Tomorrow’s Air turned to public ledgers is because of the independence of the data. Regardless of any vendor in their ecosystem, the data will persist on a distributed blockchain and be available for customers to access.
Accessing public ledgers easily using PicoNext
With PicoNext, the organisation used the Minting capability to create a tokenised Digital Product Passport of carbon removal or sustainable aviation fuel orders per customer, and then used the DPP Data Events capability to push events with data updates to the tokenised passport.
Easy-to-access sustainability data on mobile devices
With the completed Digital Product Passport in hand, Tomorrow’s Air used the Explorer capability of PicoNext to let customers and travellers view the detailed data for each carbon capture purchase through an easy-to-access, web-based viewer. In this way, travel businesses can show the step-by-step actions they're taking as part of their sustainability programmes to their customers in a simple, easy-to-use format on mobile devices.
Using a sustainable blockchain
Because the Digital Product Passports for Tomorrow’s Air are located on the sustainable Polygon blockchain, stakeholders benefit from the public ledger’s focus on low energy consumption and net-zero emissions. New proof-of-stake transaction validation on Ethereum-based blockchains like Polygon have reduced annualised electricity consumption by more than 99.988%, and reduced the blockchain’s carbon footprint by approximately 99.992%.
We’re just getting started with programmes that engage our global community of climate conscious travellers.
By demonstrating the actions we’re taking and showing progress using public ledgers, we’re building trust with our customers and driving positive, long-term impact for the environment.Looking to the future with sustainability-focused Digital Product Passports
In the future, Tomorrow’s Air may expand its Digital Product Passport in several ways, including:
- Adding details on its educational programmes to the token, including multimedia experiences like audio and video
- Pushing new updates to its Digital Product Passport with data on the progress of its carbon removal and sustainable aviation fuel payments
- Using the tokenised Digital Product Passport as the foundation of a customer experience, with exclusive offers and rewards for travellers
“We’re just getting started with programmes that engage our global community of climate conscious travellers,” said Raven Rice, Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) Data Manager at Tomorrow’s Air. “By demonstrating the actions we’re taking and showing progress using public ledgers, we’re building trust with our customers and driving positive, long-term impact for the environment.”
