Every "green" checkout you have ever seen offers the same deal: pay a little extra, feel a little better. I think that model is why climate commerce has underperformed for a decade — and at IMPT we deliberately built the opposite.
The surcharge model fails on its own terms
Ask any e-commerce team what an optional green surcharge converts at, and watch the subject change. Single-digit uptake is normal. The reasons are structural, not moral: the surcharge arrives at the worst psychological moment (checkout), it reframes climate action as a personal indulgence, and it quietly tells the customer the merchant itself isn't willing to pay.
Worse, it inverts the economics of scale. If offsetting is a customer add-on, the merchant has no incentive to make it cheaper or better — it's someone else's money.
Our model: the margin pays
A hotel booking carries a commission. The industry treats that commission as untouchable. We treat part of it as the climate budget: a booking made through IMPT funds a tonne of verified CO₂ offsetting, paid out of our commission, at no premium to the guest. The guest pays the market price for the room; the offset is a property of the transaction, not an upsell.
That single design decision does three things. It makes the climate-positive choice the default — the only behaviour change required is booking through a different site at the same price. It puts the cost pressure on us, which means we are the ones incentivised to source credits well — which is exactly why registered, government-supervised systems like the one Catalonia is building matter to our sourcing. And it makes the claim auditable per transaction, not per marketing campaign.
A tonne is not a talisman
Honesty requires saying what a tonne per booking is and isn't. An average hotel night's direct footprint is a small fraction of a tonne; a tonne per booking deliberately over-covers the stay itself and reaches into the flight and ground travel around it. It is not a claim that travel becomes consequence-free — no offset makes that true. It is a claim that each booking funds a specific, verified quantity of climate action that would not otherwise be funded, with the paperwork to prove it.
The distinction matters because greenwash is mostly a rounding-up disease: "supports climate projects" meaning a donation was made once, "carbon neutral" meaning a spreadsheet said so. When The Sunday Times looked at what we built, the phrase that stuck with me was "built for good people" — and the way you serve good people is by never asking them to take your word for anything.
The maths founders should steal
The transferable lesson isn't about hotels. It's this: fund the good outcome from your own margin and make it unconditional. Optional virtue converts terribly; default virtue converts at one hundred percent of your volume. If your unit economics can't afford the good outcome you advertise, the problem is the unit economics, not the customer's generosity.
Common questions
Does the guest pay more for the carbon offset on IMPT?
No. The offset is funded from IMPT's own commission on the booking, not added to the guest's price.
What does 'a tonne per booking' actually mean?
Each booking funds one tonne of verified CO2 offsetting — deliberately more than a typical hotel night's direct footprint, so it reaches toward the travel around the stay. It is a funded, verifiable quantity, not a claim that the trip has no impact.
Why not just let customers choose to offset?
Optional surcharges convert in single digits and make climate action an indulgence. Making the offset a default property of the transaction converts at 100% of bookings and puts the sourcing incentive on the merchant.