l etoile

Do you buy carbon offsets when you fly?

Why or why not?

If you do, do you use the airline’s provider or someone else. Is there any way to be sure they’re reliably doing what they claim?

Phantasy

In my opinion it would be super logic that these were included in the flight ticket.
For a start it should be mandatory to clearly display the impact of each flight in a way everyone understands, when selling a flight ticket. Informing people is already a big step.
Analogue to ingredients of a product, emissions of a vehicle, health / environment class of energy consuming devices that have to be displayed "clearly" (which seem to be very open for interpretation).
Thanks to petroleum and air transport lobby who continuously keep investing hard to prevent this simple policy, passengers will not be given any information about environmental impact at all.

Also an easy way, just with a click on a button, should be provided to give the buyer the option to compensate its flight impact.

Sad thing is that many companies who sell offsets (often budget airlines) have their own free interpretation in "offsetting your flight". The sky is the limit, with Ryanair as champion who offered to offset my 2 hour flight for..... 1 € ! Probably based on the ultra low fare of 9 € I payed for the ticket. So if you fly for free you are flying climate neutral, according to Ryanair.
If people actually believe this, they minimize the issue to almost nothing.

More info on offsetting can be found on this topic: Carbon Offsets , serious sites where you can offset your flights on this post: impact calculation and buying offsets

My strategy:

• find cheap flight tickets (error fares, fuel dump, hidden city ticketing, promotions) and offset them with the saved money.
  These cost often more than the flight ticket itself, but in many cases still save in comparison to the average price of a ticket to the same destination.
• Combine travels which are close to your destination and stopovers in your flight itinerary. If you have the option to do this with extended unpaid vacation, this can be even cheaper than working weeks/months longer to pay for another stack of flight tickets for your whole family traveling with you. These long far holidays compensate for alternating between holidays short from home (which can also be beautiful).
• Take the (high speed) train when you can. The difference in travel time for distances under 1 000 km / 600 miles are really almost nothing when you include travel time to airport (which is mostly remote from city center), arrival 2 hours before departure, check-in, check-out, travel from airport to city,... Night trains even save time in comparison to day flights (assuming you sleep at night). At least in West- and central-Europe where almost all travel can be done with (high speed) train in less than 24 hours. Different story in regions without an extensive high speed rail network. But still can be adventurous

It just sucks that you have by far not the same consumer rights in case of delays, cancellations with ground travel as with air travel. Equating these would make ground travel much more attractive.

cbn42

No, I don't buy offsets. I think the idea of offsets is a great one, but I have no way of knowing if the money is being used for its intended purpose, how they are measuring the amount of the offset, or whether the project they invest in would have received funding otherwise. I also don't want to normalize the idea of pollution prevention to be voluntary.

I do, however, donate money to various environmental charities, both local ones in my community and a couple of the big national/global ones.