Scaling Sustainable Tourism: Using AI to create tailored climate action plans

Climate Friendly Travel Services  is a UK start-up specialising in Climate Action Plans for Tourism companies and destinations. It is part of the SUNx Group and uses its Climate Friendly Travel Framework, which is based on:

• The Paris Agreement (limiting global warming to 1.5°C),
• The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and
• The Global Biodiversity Framework.

SUNx operates a Climate Friendly Travel Registry of over 1000 tourism businesses committed to achieving zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It delivers education through a graduate diploma and early learners programme, organises youth summits on climate-resilient tourism, and provides sustainability support focussing primarily on the world’s Least Developed Countries and Small Island Developing States. As the Climate Action support arm of SUNx, and with ambitious targets to support hundreds of climate-friendly travel communities and thousands of companies by 2030, Climate Friendly Travel Services needs technology that can match the scale of its mission.

Climate Friendly Travel Services had developed a basic proof-of-concept research tool to generate climate action plans for tourism businesses and destinations. However, the organisation lacked internal AI expertise to transform this early prototype into a scalable, production-ready solution. Without technical capabilities to refine the framework, Climate Friendly Travel Services faced the prospect of manually creating detailed climate action plans – an approach that isn’t scalable.

Tourism is a significant contributor to global emissions, and small businesses often lack resources to develop comprehensive climate strategies. Climate Friendly Travel Services’ vision was ambitious: input a company URL and supporting documents, generate a customised climate action plan, then enable businesses to refine it themselves. This would unlock the potential for regional funders such as the EU to support climate planning at scale across hundreds of tourism operators, all at the same time.

Delaying AI development would have meant losing ground to larger, more agile organisations already building similar tools.

Through the Innovate UK Business Growth RTO Grant, Climate Friendly Travel Services engaged Digital Catapult’s AI use case development and assessment service. The project paired Climate Friendly Travel Services with a Data Scientist and Machine Learning Engineer from Digital Catapult, who brought deep technical expertise in AI architecture and implementation.

The engagement focused on creating a robust technical framework that would enable Climate Friendly Travel Services to move beyond its initial prototype. Digital Catapult’s data scientist conducted comprehensive research into cloud-based solutions including Azure and AWS, explored options that Climate Friendly Travel Services’ hadn’t considered, and ultimately designed an agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture specifically tailored to Climate Friendly Travel Services’ needs.

This architectural approach segments data intelligently and deploys multiple AI agents that perform specific roles, all while working collaboratively as a team. Each agent references relevant information within its domain, creating a sophisticated system where AI components work together to generate accurate, contextualised climate action plans. The framework included critical elements around guardrails and responsible AI implementation to ensure outputs met Climate Friendly Travel Services’ high standards for accuracy and climate impact.

In addition to the technical support provides, Digital Catapult’s business analysis support helped the company compare implementation options with a predefined assessment criteria and translated the technical into business implication and recommendations the company could easily action.

The Digital Catapult engagement delivered tangible acceleration and strategic value for Climate Friendly Travel Services including:

• Speeding up development timelines: The project compressed Climate Friendly Travel Services’ development roadmap by three months, enabling work that wouldn’t have started for some time to begin immediately. This time saving was crucial given Climate Friendly Travel Services’ wants to focus on enhancing the AI research using the expertise of their team of specialists.

• Advancing technical maturity: Climate Friendly Travel Services moved from a rudimentary proof of concept to a proper research and development testing stage, with a clear technical framework ready for implementation.

• Strategic validation: The project demonstrated that AI development was fundamental to the business’s future. This has helped to fast-track the next phase of development.

• Laying foundations for scaling up: The agentic RAG architecture provides the technical foundation for Climate Friendly Travel Services to process hundreds of climate action plans simultaneously – essential for achieving its 2030 targets of supporting thousands of tourism businesses.

• Competitive positioning: By accelerating the development of its AI capabilities, Climate Friendly Travel Services strengthened its position against larger organisations already working on similar climate technology solutions.

Digital Catapult’s AI and machine learning expert explored multiple approaches, including RAG architectures and Agentic AI to provide insights and offer alternatives that best suited the needs of Climate Friendly Travel Services. Reflecting on this, Olly Wheatcroft emphasised both the technical substance and strategic impact: “The agentic RAG architecture, that use agents to perform specific roles…will be what makes this a very successful tool. We knew about this approach, but for me, that was the real substance of what we are now working to put into action.”

During the ten-week project, Digital Catapult’s support was continuous throughout, adapting to the pace of Climate Friendly Travel Services, and enabling it to unlock forward momentum. “The biggest achievement is that you’ve (Digital Catapult) allowed us to essentially get the ball rolling on something where, if we don’t move fast on it, we’re going to be overtaken by much bigger, more agile organisations who are probably working on this sort of stuff already.”

For organisations requiring AI use case development and assessment to help overcome challenges, Wheatcroft’s advice centres on the value of specialist technical expertise. “Digital Catapult’s data scientist did a lot of research around cloud-based solutions which were dismissed initially but are now actually coming back into play,” he adds. “There were certain things around guardrails and the whole agentic framework which they mapped out that have given us the framework we’ve now put into development.”

The Climate Friendly Travel Services case demonstrates how Digital Catapult’s targeted technical support can accelerate AI readiness for mission-driven organisations, by de-risking innovation, providing access to expertise, and convening capabilities for purposeful collaboration. The project has enabled Climate Friendly Travel Services to scale its impact while maintaining the exacting standards required in producing climate action plans.