Every climate product I've used as a consumer has, at some point, asked me to be the hero. There's a checkbox at the end of the basket. A small extra fee. A line item that says: do you, dear customer, want to do the right thing? It's a clever bit of design, because it transfers both the cost and the moral burden onto the person who has the least leverage in the entire transaction. We built IMPT.io the other way around. The offset comes out of our commission, not the traveller's wallet. That choice isn't generosity. It's a deliberate piece of unit economics, and it's the only way I know to make the climate the default rather than an opt-in.
The checkbox is the problem
If you put a climate option at the end of any flow, conversion to that option is a function of mood, friction, and trust. On a good day, a small minority of customers tick the box. On a bad day, almost none do. The maths of "ask the user to pay" are well understood by anyone who has run an e-commerce funnel for any length of time. You're filtering for a tiny segment of already-motivated buyers and then congratulating yourself for serving them.
That isn't climate action. It's a marketing surface. The tonnes that get retired through opt-in offsets are real, but the model has a ceiling baked into it: it can never be larger than the willingness of individual consumers to pay extra at the moment of checkout, on top of a price they have already mentally committed to.
The behaviour we want is harder. We want a world where booking a hotel just is carbon-positive, the way we'd like a tap to just be drinkable. No checkbox. No upsell. No virtuous customer. The only way to get there is to absorb the cost into the platform and price the platform accordingly. That's what climate default actually means.
What a tonne costs, and where it sits on the P&L
I won't quote you a per-tonne figure, because the on-chain offset market moves and because the price we pay depends on the project, the vintage, and the volume committed. What I will tell you is the structural shape of it, because that's where the economics either work or don't.
A hotel booking generates a commission to the platform. That commission has to cover: the cost of the inventory relationship, payment processing, fraud, refunds, customer support, the engineering and infrastructure of the platform itself, marketing, and — eventually — profit. Into that same commission line, we slot the cost of retiring one tonne of CO₂ on-chain per booking. It is a real line item. It comes out of gross margin, not out of the traveller's basket.
The question every other founder asks me at this point is the same one: how do you make the maths work? Three answers.
- Volume. With 1.7M hotels across 195 countries, the per-booking economics aren't a boutique craft. They're an industrial flow. A tonne retired against a four-night stay in a city hotel is a very different ratio to a tonne retired against a single-night roadside booking, and the blended number is what matters.
- Supplier rate. The single biggest lever in any OTA is the rate you negotiate with the supply side. We don't negotiate against the offset cost; we negotiate the same way any serious distribution partner does, and the offset sits inside our take, not theirs. The hotel doesn't pay for the tonne. The customer doesn't pay for the tonne. We do.
- Cross-subsidy from the wider IMPT estate. The booking platform is one surface. The shopping side, with 20,000+ partner brands, the IMPT Token, and the IMPT Card, contributes margin that lets us price the booking line aggressively without breaking the model.
None of that is magic. It's a deliberate decision to spend gross margin on a tonne instead of, say, a louder ad campaign or a fatter loyalty rebate. We treat the offset as a cost of goods sold, not a marketing line. That distinction matters. It means the climate outcome is durable across cycles, because it's wired into how we account for a sale, not into a discretionary budget that gets cut the moment a quarter looks tight.
Negotiating supplier rates without bending the model
The supplier-rate conversation is where most green-travel models quietly die. A platform that sells itself on sustainability often ends up either (a) charging customers more to fund the offset, which collapses conversion, or (b) squeezing the hotel for a deeper net rate to fund the offset, which collapses supply. Both fail.
The version that works is the version where the platform takes a normal commercial rate from the hotel — the same rate any peer OTA would take — and then chooses, on its own side of the ledger, to spend a portion of that on retiring a tonne. From the hotel's perspective, IMPT looks like a distribution channel that performs. From the traveller's perspective, IMPT looks like a booking site with a competitive price. The climate outcome is invisible to both parties at the point of sale, which is exactly the point.
If you make the supplier feel the cost of your sustainability story, you'll lose inventory. If you make the customer feel it, you'll lose the basket. The only place to put it is on yourself.
Why "climate default" beats "climate option"
I think a lot about the difference between an option and a default, because the gap between them is where most climate fintech lives or dies. An option requires intent, attention, and willingness to pay. A default requires none of those things. Defaults are how behaviour scales.
The traveller booking a weekend in eco-hotels in Kilkenny on our platform doesn't need to think about offsets, vintages, or registries. They book a room. The tonne is retired in the background, on-chain, paid for by us. If they care, they can verify it. If they don't, the outcome is identical. That's what climate default looks like in practice — the absence of friction, not the presence of virtue.
This is also, incidentally, why I find the language of "green premium" so frustrating. The premium model assumes the customer should pay more to do less harm. That framing has had a long run and it has not, by any measure that matters, bent the curve. A platform model — where the climate cost is absorbed into the unit economics of every transaction — is, I think, the only thing that scales.
What it actually costs us to do this
It costs margin. That's the honest answer. Every tonne we retire is gross margin we don't keep. We've made a choice that this is the right place to spend it, and the choice is internally consistent because the entire platform is positioned around that promise. If we removed the offset tomorrow, IMPT wouldn't be IMPT. It would be a slightly cheaper, slightly more profitable, entirely undifferentiated booking site.
There's a second cost, which is operational. Retiring a tonne on-chain per booking requires real plumbing — registry integration, accounting, audit, the on-chain rails themselves. We've built that, and we maintain it, and it isn't free. But it's an investment that compounds. Every booking we add to the flow is a marginal call on infrastructure that already exists.
And there's a third cost, which is the one nobody talks about: the cost of explaining the model. When you don't ask the customer to pay, you have to do the work of telling them why the climate part is real anyway. That's most of what I spend my time on. It's also why we publish what we do, on-chain and otherwise, and why I'd rather write 1,500 words explaining the unit economics than print a slogan on a banner.
The wider point about climate fintech
Sustainable booking economics is one example of a broader pattern. The climate fintech models that will last are the ones that route the cost away from the consumer's checkbox and into the platform's cost base. That requires founders to make a real choice about where margin goes — into a tonne, or into a quarterly number — and to live with the consequences. It also requires the supply side to be priced in a way that doesn't punish them for participating. Neither is easy. Both are doable.
What I'd push back on, hard, is the idea that this is altruism. It isn't. It's a bet that the long-run defensibility of a platform whose climate outcome is a default beats the short-run margin of a platform whose climate outcome is an option. I'm comfortable with that bet. The alternative — running another OTA with a checkbox — isn't a business I'd want to build.
What to do this week
If you run a product that has a climate line item: take it off the customer and put it on yourself. Re-price elsewhere if you have to. The number of customers who ticked your box was never going to be the number that mattered. If you book travel this week, book it somewhere the tonne is already paid for, and ask the platforms that aren't doing it why they aren't. We'll keep doing what we're doing — every booking on IMPT.io retires one tonne, paid out of our commission, on-chain, no checkbox — and we'll keep showing the working. That's the only honest version of green travel pricing I've found.