Making sustainable travel feel rewarding

Working with a team of four other students from CHAS Academy, I helped envision and design a digital platform to encourage more sustainable public transportation. Our proposal: a webpage that rewards people for taking the train on trips inside the Nordic countries, earning Greenpoints redeemable for future trips or products.

We followed the five stages of Design Thinking: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.

Our first challenge was finding out what stops people from choosing trains over flights, and how a digital product could remove those obstacles. Interviews and surveys showed four key findings:

• People struggle to rate their own environmental impact: some overestimate how eco-friendly they are, others underestimate it.
• Price, travel time and convenience are the biggest obstacles to choosing a greener alternative to flying.
• A motivational scoring system, earning vouchers for greener choices, was received positively.
• Pain points to avoid: being redirected to another booking site, too many stops, and carbon data shown without context.

We built an affinity map and identified five behavioural types (Planner, Inspiration seeker, Sustainability savvy, Price hunter and Newly arrived), clustered into three categories to guide our strategy.

Based on the research, we developed Ecotrip: a booking system for trains between Nordic countries, designed to make sustainable travel easier to choose.

It shows travellers how much carbon dioxide their trip emits, building awareness of their impact. Booking through the platform earns Greenpoints that can be redeemed for vouchers, turning a values-based choice into a rewarding one.