What Is Sustainable Luxury Travel?
That’s an oxymoron if I ever heard one! How on earth can luxury and sustainability be compatible? People should simply have lower expectations if they want to endorse sustainable practices, surely
Now whilst this is certainly true of the process of travel, e.g. flying Business Class over Economy is responsible for between 2.6 and 4.3 times the emissions in the same plane (source: International Council on Clean Transportation), it’s not necessarily the case that opting for sustainable luxury in terms of accommodation is more harmful to the environment than a less luxurious choice. In fact, in some cases, the more high-end accommodation, due to its higher cost, has more resources that it can direct towards sustainability than a smaller less expensive place. Consider for example the relative cost of installing solar panels to produce clean energy to power a small ten-bedroom guesthouse over installing solar panels in a fifty room hotel: the economies of scale mean that as a percentage of turnover, even the larger solar array needed for the larger hotel is effectively lower than it would be for the smaller guesthouse.
When you travel with Where It All Began, every place you stay at is first of all at least four-star in standard and without exception, every accommodation we book and recommend has a plan in place to increase its sustainability, whilst keeping its luxury.
Barefoot Luxury at Thonga Beach Lodge
There’s a stubborn myth in travel circles: if it’s sustainable, it has to be spartan. Cold showers. No amenities. A noble but uncomfortable experience.
We disagree.
At Where It All Began, we believe you can have both: adventure and elegance, impact and indulgence. That belief comes to life at Thonga Beach Lodge, one of the standout stops on our Off-Road Cycling, Slackpacking & Scuba Diving Adventure.
Hidden in the dune forests of iSimangaliso Wetland Park, this remote retreat is wild in the best way—but never without comfort. Think private thatched suites with king-sized beds, wide open decks, deep soaking tubs, and the sound of the ocean just beyond the trees. Dinners are candlelit, seafood is fresh, and service is as warm and personal as the KwaZulu-Natal sunshine.
And the kicker? While you’re unwinding in this pocket of barefoot sustainable luxury, you’re supporting something far greater. Thonga partners with the local Mabibi Primary School, helping with infrastructure, nutrition, and teacher support. The lodge also contributes to marine conservation efforts, from turtle monitoring to reducing plastic waste along this ecologically sensitive coastline.
This is a place where sustainability is stitched into the experience—but never shouted. You’ll feel it in the way the lodge blends into the land, the thoughtful sourcing of ingredients, the warmth of the team who call the area home.
More Sustainable Luxury Lodges We Love
Thonga Beach Lodge is of course very much about its destination, being a beach-front hotel in a remote part of country. But can you also find sustainable hotels in Southern Africa in other locations, for example in city centres and national parks? The answer is a resounding ‘yes’: consider for example Oude Werf which is one of the oldest sustainable luxury hotels in South Africa, situated in the arboreally-plentiful Stellenbosch town centre. It’s been Fair Trade in Tourism and Travelife accredited for over ten years. Group Sustainabilty Manager Chris van Zyl says: ‘We started with the basics of recycling our solid waste in 2010 but now have moved on to generating our own solar thermal power, as well as making use of energy and water-wise devices’. Oude Werf also goes to great lengths to conduct procurement from smaller, local companies but whilst doing all this offers a range of spacious four-star standard rooms and all the facilities you’d expect from a four-star hotel.
In Kruger National Park, Tanda Tula is a sustainable luxury hotel that’s also an eco-friendly resort. Having started as a tented camp in the 1990s, it’s now transformed into a collection of permanent structures. As Nina Scott (founding director) says: ‘There are four pillars to our work: education, community development, healthcare and conservation’. Tanda Tula explicitly states its spend on these pillars and the impact every year on its website and the figures make for inspiring reading.
Hotels like Oude Werf and Tanda Tula feature in several of our journeys: for example, our luxury adventure trip Cape Peninsula and Winelands Cycling Holiday takes in the sites of Stellenbosch and our Luxury Travel from Victoria Falls to Cape Town makes use of Tanda Tula.
What Makes a Hotel Truly Eco-Friendly?
So, what do we at Where It All Began look for before listing an eco-friendly hotel (or a hotel that purports to be one)? First and foremost, we’re looking for a stated purpose towards sustainable development and sustainable practices. That means we won’t necessarily apply the same criteria to all hotels: green technology is one thing in a city centre and something else in a deeply rural location. A large safari lodge may be forced to use sustainable energy because it’s too far from a power station, but a city hotel won’t have the space for lots of solar panels.
Examples of stated purpose could include:
- Attempts to recycle solid waste or repurpose liquid waste
- Attempts to use sustainable energy and/or energy saving devices
- Attempts to use smaller, local providers for goods and services
- Attempts to use less water or source water from a renewable resource
- Permanent, engaged and measured conservation and community upliftment initiatives
- Stated aims in terms of staff development such as living wages, on site accommodation, medical, life and personal insurance
The Myth of Roughing it in Responsible Tourism
So no, sustainable travel doesn’t mean sacrificing comfort. It means choosing comfort that does good. Because sustainable travel means:
- Staying somewhere that blends in, not takes over (and we mean this both in the physical, societal and environmental senses)
- Giving back to communities, not taking from them
- Exploring deeper, but treading lighter
- Feeling grounded, without feeling like you’ve gone without
This is not roughing it. This is refined. Responsible. Remarkable.
This is what sustainable luxury looks like—start your journey here.
Start your Sustainable Luxury Journey with Where It All Began
It’s not often when making a choice about how or at what level to do something that the most refined, most exclusive and most upmarket choice is the most ethical and sustainable one. Green hotels and eco lodges aren’t attached at the hip to spartan inconvenience. On a journey with Where It All Began, you can truly look forward to a sustainable luxury experience that you will benefit immensely from but that also has direct and positive impacts on the people and places you will visit.
