The Road is a concept for a new online sustainable travel platform for the Finnish market. It provides customers the opportunity to book and compare different land and sea-based modes of travel, including travel packages, while highlighting the savings in CO2 emissons compared to flying.
Its aim is to make sustainable land travel an affordable, accessible, and adventure-filled experience for Finnish travelers. To achieve this, the most sustainable journey options for a given route are evaluated, taking into account personal preferences. The impact of each journey option is visualized to enable easy comparison so that travelers can make educated, well-informed choices regarding their travel.
Challenge
Tourism accounts for around 8% of all global greenhouse gas emissions and air transport especially is having a huge impact on climate change. As interest in lifestyle changes grows to reduce individual carbon footprints, many people are seeking sustainable travel solutions. In Finland, finding affordable and practical alternatives to air travel can be challenging given that it is more geographically isolated compared to other regions in Europe. An additional challenge is that current options are limited to websites from other countries, many of which do not work well in the Nordics and don’t tend to compare the environmental or economic impact of different options. As a result, a lot of work is required to understand both economic and environmental considerations when making travel decisions.
Process
Given the brief to develop a proposal and business model for a sustainable and socially-oriented enterprise, our team was interested in exploring the topic of green mobility. After some initial research and collective brainstorming, we decided to focus on eco-tourism. Following that, we investigated and evaluated current options and platforms for arranging journeys within and outside of Finland. Some of the team also attended a local travel fair as part of deepening our understanding of the current situation, gaps and opportunities in the Finnish travel market.
Vision for Sustainable Impact
It soon became clear that finding reliable information about economic and environmental impacts of different travel options was quite time consuming and required visiting multiple websites. As air travel often generates the highest CO2 emissions (especially for shorter distance travel), we wanted to promote alternative land and/or sea-based options that would be appealing despite significantly longer travel times. Our approach was to address these challenges through our core values as well as a holistic, triple bottom line approach to sustainability.
Concept Development
First, we took inspiration from existing online journey planner platforms and explored how to make the tradeoffs between CO2 emissions, travel time, and cost as clear and transparent as possible for our target customers. This provided us with a rough outline of possible user journeys, services and interactions within the online platform to develop our concept further. Second, we explored how we could collaborate with and support potential green tourism partners while also infusing more discovery and adventure into the travel journeys the platform would offer. My key contribution to this process was to translate our ideas into a user flow and through further development and refinement I designed and built a click-through prototype to illustrate a key user journey.
As this project took place within a masters level course on sustainable approaches to social enterprises and entrepreneurship, our deliverables emphasized sustainability assessments and business model development over service design methods and prototypes.
Our vision is to be a collaborative ecosystem player that leverages partnerships as both a source of revenue and as support in providing an excellent service to our customers.
We also proposed light partnerships with other sustainable third party companies, such as hotels and travel providers, to promote their services on our platform. In this way we can provide our customers with options for other elements of their journey beyond purely transport. For example, customers can also review options of where to stay during a layover or some activities at their destination.
Impact
We received very positive feedback on our service concept. Our proposal for a sustainable travel platform was regarded as very timely and desirable within the Finnish tourism market. Although we propose to make travelling by land easier to plan and coordinate from Finland, current alternatives to air travel take significantly more time. And yet, travelling by land/sea will become even more viable once new direct routes between Tallinn and Warsaw via fully electrified trains is completed in 2026.
Next Steps
Given this positive reception to our service concept, I considered how we might develop the front-facing user experience further into a more robust prototype that could be tested with potential customers. Building from the key scenario we described in the demo, I developed detailed wireframes of what an accessible, mobile-first user experience could look like. This new design was finalized with a new visual branding and UI.
Learning Outcomes
Through this project I learned how to successfully develop a sustainable business concept by using tools like a business model canvas, cost structure estimates, and sustainability screening. This also included considering factors like market gaps and opportunities, financing, revenue streams, and partnerships as part of service concept development. Furthermore, our team learned to effectively take these factors, alongside sustainability and service experience goals, and align them with our core values.
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