Exclusive: Luxury Explorer plants a tree in one of our own woods for every room night booked through us.

Each tree bears our customer's name and we can even arrange for personal members of our Luxe-Trotters Club to visit 'their' trees.

Why?

Every business must now act responsibly with regard to the environment. In this context, travel is a particularly emotive and contentious subject, so we want to provide a simple and effective way of offsetting some of the environmental impact of luxe-trotting.

Luxury Explorer plants a tree for every room night booked through us. This means: any room booked online on any of our partners' hotel websites while you are in the LuxuryExplorer.com portal; or via an LE availability request; or even if you book by telephone direct with the hotel (as long as you let us and them know that you found the hotel through LE). If flights are booked using LE's 'First Class' flights service, the carbon offset for the journey will be calculated and the appropriate number of trees planted in one of our own designated woods.

Luxury Explorer also plants trees to offset our own carbon footprint, including all travel relating to reviewing and selecting hotel partners around the World.

How?

The idea is simple; 1 Room = 1 Tree means that every room night booked with LE results in a tree being planted on your behalf. Book a room for 7 nights at one of our hotels and we'll plant 7 trees. But Luxury Explorer is not content to simply 'trade' the carbon offset to some unknown third party.

For the same reasons we inspect each of our hotel partners, regularly visiting them to write our Top6Trips reviews, we also want to know that the trees we donate are actually planted and won't be bulldozed after a year or two. And when some of them are, necessarily, felled that the timber is put to good use. So we've decided to plant our own woods, using sustainable management techniques and, as proof, every tree planted will be tagged with our customers' names, providing a full audit trail.

Luxury Explorer's first wood is being planted at Denhay Farm near Bridport, in the beautiful Marshwood Vale in Dorset, UK. Denhay is famous for its outstanding Cheddar cheese, air dried hams and bacons and, also, as a key supplier to Duchy Originals.

George Streatfeild, Denhay's managing director, shares Luxury Explorer's vision and passion for quality, service, environmental responsibility and accountability and is delighted to be LE's first partner.

How will it work?

Planting trees is simple, nurturing them to maturity when they will have a positive impact on the environment is more complex. This is why Luxury Explorer wants direct control of the process.

LE has leased land from Denhay Farms on a long-term contract and is planting designated areas with healthy saplings. Each acre will comprise 700 trees. As hotel room nights are booked, LE will 'personalise' each tree, by tagging them with the name of each customer. When the first acre is fully allocated a second will be planted and so on. By appointment, personal members of our 'Luxe-Trotters Club' (currently >750 worldwide) can even visit the wood to see 'their' trees for themselves. Regular updates of the wood's growth will be posted on Luxury Explorer.com

Over time, woodland requires careful management and after eight to ten years up to 50% of the trees will need to be removed as the wood is 'thinned', to allow the maturing trees to continue their healthy growth. However, by this point, the trees will be much more effective at absorbing carbon dioxide, so the eco-effect of the investment continues to improve. The felled trees will then be used to create a Luxury Explorer collection of furniture and accessories, such as picture frames, to be designed by famous designers.

Luxury Explorer will plant only indigenous hardwood trees at Denhay: mainly oaks, beeches, cherry and some alder, for wetter areas. The cherry trees will be the fastest growing and the oaks the slowest, but this blended approach creates a balanced woodland area over the long-term.

During 2007 Luxury Explorer will choose other sites where the company can have similar direct access to the woodland or forest, while maintaining its need for fully audited planting and management.

For more information write to: contact@luxuryexplorer.com or visit Denhay Farm's website at www.denhay.co.uk