March 2025
Why put up with hours squeezed into a tin box before you start your holiday? Our speakers from Byway were impressive with the scope and range of their knowledge about exciting (and relaxing) holidays you can arrange without having to go near an airport. Travel city centre to city centre and enjoy the journey almost as much as the destination. Our speakers are full of enthusiasm and experience and will inspire you to try new places and new ways of getting there.
You are welcome to use the Byway website to plan your own holiday – or they will arrange everything for you. Sean and Yannis are happy for you to contact them by email: Yannis Baur yannis.b@byway.travel Sean Fail sean@byway.travel
The Speakers
Sean Fail and Yannis Baur work with Byway, a b-corp company that arranges exciting flight-free, carbon-aware travel so you can keep your emissions low and have great holidays too.
Yannis says “I was drawn to Byway because I’ve drastically cut down my personal air miles, and try not to fly within Europe. Byway takes the hassle out of figuring out what routes you can take and which ticket combo (eg Interrail Pass) might result in the best value journey. It is a complicated business that most people don’t have time to spend their evenings on.”
Sean says “I’m the first point of contact for Byway customers. My role involves putting together flight-free itineraries, ensuring trips run smoothly, helping with any disruptions along the way, and communicating closely with customers. I also use their feedback to refine and improve the Byway experience.
I try personally to live and travel more sustainably. I’m passionate about our mission to make flight-free travel mainstream, and it’s exciting to be part of a company that inspires greener travel in such a creative and impactful way.”
There were a small number of questions that Sean and Yannis needed to check before answering, and here are their answers. This will give you a flavour of their thorough and practical approach, and how much they packed into the 45 minutes that we recorded.
- Do we assume trains are at capacity when calculating emissions per passenger?
The short answer is no, but the reality is that we do depend on rail providers’ data to provide this information, so it may well vary from country to country.
To give an example: in France, the carbon emitted per passenger is calculated annually. They take “all the energy consumed by their fleet” and divide it by “all the passenger kms travelled that year”, which means they avoid making assumptions on how full any individual train actually is.
You can find a link to SNCF’s breakdown of this here. It’s in French but you can click for a translation. - Are hybrid ferries better than conventional ones?
The answer seems to be yes – though ideally, companies would move over to fully electric / sustainably run vessels. This often comes with high costs to adapt fleets and infrastructure around them, so hybrid ferries offer a mid-term solution, allowing companies to adapt less drastically, while still investing in vessels that could run (almost) exclusively on green energy. I found an article on this here.
What sleepers can one take from Paris?
You can reach quite a wide range of places from Paris:
Nightjet: Berlin, Vienna
IC Nuit: Nice, Cerbère, Latour-de-Carol*, Toulouse and Tarbes (this one stops in Bayonne*)
*both stations for onward travel to Spain.
Speak up for our Planet 