In April 2022, Dominic Hare, CEO of Blenheim Palace, spoke at greenloop, blooloop’s annual conference on sustainability in visitor attractions. During his session, he talked about the carbon footprint of the attraction’s visitor journey and strategies to measure, reduce and offset.
The problem of green journeys
The fundamental problem for the team at Blenheim is that the attraction is a stately home in the middle of nowhere in Oxfordshire. Many visitors come from the city of Oxford, some distance away.
“Our challenge is how we get from somewhere to nowhere in a green way,” Hare explains. “The fundamental issue for most stately homes is that no one ever built a stately home near a major public transit hub. In fact, most Lords and Dukes and other originators of stately homes would have picked the quietest, most desolate area they can.
“Many landed estates and heritage houses are actually quite difficult to get to if you’re doing anything other than driving in your own car.”
A key goal
Blenheim is relatively fortunate, in that it is more accessible than many.
“However,” Hare points out:
“Fundamentally, of course, our business model today is based on attracting people to come from a fairly long way away to a location which is mainly accessible only by motorcar. To make things even worse, network constraints in our local area mean that we can only offer very limited electric vehicle charging.”
“If our business model is based on attracting people from a long way away, we’re already starting with a big problem.
“15%-20% of our audience is made up of international travellers, but they represent around half of the total carbon impact. That’s a massive problem for us. One for which we felt, from Day One, we would have to take responsibility, if we are to be carbon-balanced, which is, overall, our commitment. We want to be carbon-neutral by 2027.”
Carbon reduction and offset
This timescale will involve, he explains, a great deal of offset:
“You cannot do it at that speed just by carbon reduction. We expect to see it work out at about 5% incremental carbon reductions each year through operations. More importantly, we plan to divert half of our visitor journeys across the year to low-carbon, more green visitor journeys. We will then deal with the balance by offset.
“Our offset is pretty much all delivered on our land – the blessings of being a landed estate, I guess. It consists of things like solar generation; regenerative agriculture, a method of farming that locks vast amounts of carbon into the soil; wetland restoration, ditto, and an awful lot of newly planted woodlands.”
Over the last year, about 160 hectares, or 270,000 trees have been planted:
“We’re well on our way,” he comments. “Interestingly, those offset projects all have their own business models. This is not just a question of us expending resources to get rid of carbon. These business models should produce their own return, as well as a carbon return.”
Transport accounts for a large portion of carbon emissions
The baseline in terms of visitor transit is two-thirds of the attraction’s total carbon:
“In February 2020, in blissful ignorance of what was about to come around the corner, we launched an experiment. We offered our visitors a 50% discount to come to us by green means.”
At that point:
“Our baseline was that about 4% of our visitors came by green means – as in bicycle or bus. With that discount, it instantly moved to 9% but dropped away quickly. That, of course, was the pandemic effect, which rather destroyed the experiment. We will go again with that. We’re running currently at a 30% discount for green travel.”
In terms of getting to 50% green journeys, the building blocks are based on the understanding that coaches will become increasingly green:
“They certainly are in our local area. Here, there’s legislation to force all collective transport to be greener and greener,” he says. “Based on our experiment, we expect to lift bus and cycle travel from its baseline 4% to around 10% through price incentives. And that’s before we try anything new.”
Green journeys and the rise of EVs
Electric vehicles are currently statistically negligible. However, he comments:
“Based on sales patterns, you would have to imagine by 2026 that something like 4% of our visitor journeys will be by EV. If you add those up, around one-third of our visitor journeys will be by green means. The major blockers to going further are, firstly, our Christmas business. We have a large Christmas light trail that’s around 200,000 visitors. In winter, when it’s cold, later in the day, and, typically with kids, it will be harder to switch to public transport and bicycles.”
There are also issues around the venue’s major events:
“The international horse trials and so on will tend to exhaust the public transport capacity. We have an active annual pass market, and these are people who aren’t paying to make their return visits. So, it’s difficult to offer them financial incentives. The annual pass is concentrated more locally; holders do shorter-duration trips.
“If you’re coming to Blenheim for an hour-and-a-half long walk, you are probably less likely to accept greatly increased travel times than if you were coming from further away.”
Bus, train and bike travel
To make a modal shift easier, the team is working hard on bus, train, and bike promotions:
“We have also just launched complementary transport from our nearest station, Hanborough. The nice thing there is we’ve been able to run the bus right into the heart of our site through an exclusive entrance. That means you avoid any queues. You get a lovely view on the way in, and are deposited much closer than anyone else can park.”
New cycle routes ate about to be built through the Blenheim Palace woodlands:
“It should be quite a spectacular cycle route. That, again, will make the link from the station to Blenheim Palace much easier.”
Lastly:
“We’re hoping – and this is perhaps slightly optimistic – to arrange for bicycle hire from that station so that people could get the train to the station, and then cycle on beautiful woodland glade cycle paths to get to Blenheim.”
Greener options for local journeys
Building on the fact that buses are currently being brought onto the site and dropping passengers off close to the Palace, he says:
“We will move from buses being the closest drop-off, to making the cars go further away, as a kind of park-and-ride strategy of making car transport a little bit less appealing. Buses will be the most attractive offer. Another advantage of that is people who visit us by car will see the buses quite visibly. That, I think, is a useful seed for local visits.”
If the ten-week experimental period is successful, a greener equivalent to the current diesel shuttle will be purchased and used going forward:
“In terms of funding this, our county council is already funding some new bus lanes as they take green travel more seriously. Our rail operator has been helping us market the bus links that we’ve put in place, and helped with the collateral for the bus stops, etc.”
Incentives for more sustainable travel
Hare illustrates the commercial case to be made by using the connection between Marylebone and Bicester Village as an example:
“We would, I think, like to try and build a default association with London, Paddington, and will fund this by growing the pie. Equally, I would stress we shouldn’t underestimate the savings that we will make in car park costs and repairs and infrastructure.”
“If we can divert these visitor journeys into greener means for our customers, we think the 30% discount is likely to be good enough. But we will experiment again as the year normalises with higher discounts. Annual pass holders are the biggest challenge because they’re not paying for their incremental business, anyway.”
They will, accordingly, experiment with different incentives, whether it’s free coffee or plants or seeds, to encourage people to make a greener journey.
Staff transport matters too
In terms of staff journeys, he explains:
“We ran a glorious spreadsheet of all our staff postcodes, and compared, using Google Maps on an automated link, their drive time to work with what their quickest public transport time to work would be. Then, we classified them into people for whom it was impossible to come by green means, and people for whom it was easy. We worked out the number of journeys they were likely to have made.”
From that, he could extrapolate the carbon saving that would result if those who could easily switch to green travel, did so. It came to around 32,000 kg of carbon – around 1/20th of non-visitor travel:
“It’s certainly worth going for,” he says. “The staff incentives came about when we did the visitor travel experiment, to bribe them to come by greener means. Our staff immediately put their hand up and said, ‘Well, aren’t you going to bribe us?’
“So we came up with a point system. If they did five green journeys a week, they got pizza at the end of the week.”
He adds:
“We may come up with a different incentive next time. In terms of staff incentives, I’ve also seen that personal carbon pledges work very well as well. [The construction company] Morgan Sindall have been great pioneers of that, in order to make it easy to be green.”
The cost of offsetting
We are now in an era when pre-booking is more common than the alternatives.
“We did our biggest Easter ever this year with almost 90% pre-booking. When you have that initial link of the relationship, you can predict the carbon impact of any visitor. You can then share that with the audience, and offer them a genuine offset or inset to try and make that journey more efficient.
“If you’re a visitor planning to come, we can ask you where you’re coming from. We can show you automatically the likely carbon impact of different modes of transport. Everything from zero kilograms for walking, up to 43 kilograms for a car. We can highlight the bus and train options. We can price up, at market rates, what the cost of offset would be.”
This is something that can be shared with customers:
“We could choose to do it by ourselves,” Hare says. “We could ask customers if they’d be willing to. At the moment, of course, we offer bribes to switch people to greener journeys, so we are taking the financial pain of that.
“We are switching from offering a simple offset through tree planting to offering customers a choice of three different routes. One of these will be tree planting, but the others might be less carbon-centric: wetland restoration, or something like that.”
A visible impact
He adds:
“The bigger picture, of course, for a landed estate like us, is those offsets can be delivered by us. It’s not a question of us buying carbon offsets from Indonesia or Scotland. We can actually do that on-site, and we can do that through direct offsets; tree planting and carbon sequestration.”
Alternatively, it can be achieved through developing better low-carbon facilities, such as cycle paths, local workplaces, or passive house construction.
“If you run a big visitor attraction like this, you can never forget the impact you have on the local area in all sorts of ways. You can channel that inset or offset into local new woodlands that local people can explore and share, and so on. That feels like it’s a nice, virtuous circle.”
Greener journeys need more infrastructure
Offering power for EVs and coach charging has been an issue, Hare explains, because the grid locally is highly constrained:
“If we simply apply to put in chargers, no is the answer. However, we are completing the building of a solar park that is, by our standards, significant: it’s around seven megawatts. We are very close to agreeing with SC networks that, along with us, they will fund a micro-grid back to Blenheim, with battery storage that opens up the ability to do a huge amount of charging that isn’t a possibility today.”
As far as coaches are concerned, he says:
“While we’ve had no inquiries from coach operators saying they would like to charge their electric coach, I would like to think that, having opened up the outside grid constraint by taking ourselves mostly off-grid, even if we are not generating enough power to recharge coaches, that will certainly be available outside that power.
“I suspect we are a year from the technical ability, and probably more than a year from coach manufacturers asking this of us. But if there is a coach manufacturer who would like to do that, we’d be delighted to talk to them.”
The financial side
In closing, he outlines the business inset models, and how they are monetised:
“In terms of solar, obviously, you can get a base return by exporting what you generate to the national grid. You get a better return if you can join yourself to that supply, in either a sleeping arrangement whereby you pay the national grid to carry that electricity to you and you use it, so it substitutes for the electricity you would have purchased, or, as in our case, you build a private connection. We are expending capital on that.”
“Those things together are expected to offer us about six and a half to 7% yield. That is not as good as we would expect from a commercial investment. But when you add the carbon benefit on top, it’s vastly worth doing woodland and wetland. We are receiving a combination of the timber income. Planting grants in the UK have been massively increased in the last year. And we have attracted support from large corporations who buy a part of the carbon from us.
“That makes the activity profitable for us while leaving enough carbon to allow us to achieve our own carbon goals.
Local support for greener journeys
Locals are broadly very supportive of Blenheim’s Green Transit plans. However:
“There are some concerns that we might undermine subsidised bus travel from some of the local villages which don’t have enough volumes to justify their own buses. On the whole, though, those villages are more excited to use our new cycle paths. The paths that join the stations to us also join their villages to our town centre. This is something people are really positive about.
“Realistically, over the last five years, we have completely snarled up the roads with traffic two or three times. So, when we say positively that we’re trying to move people out of cars, it will be welcomed more than it raises concerns.”
