Working out where to go on holiday gets harder and harder - and not only because of pressing issues such as whether Italian food is better than French.

The vast majority of concerned consumers also want to consider the social and environmental impact of the holidays that they take. This comes as no surprise. The greater the level of involvement with a purchase decision and the more it is taken to express something about the individual, their values and ideals, the more that social and environmental issues matter.

The growing desire to factor in ethics creates a thirst for information and 85 per cent of concerned consumers feel that they do not know enough to make an informed choice.

They want to know the carbon intensity, the environmental impact of factors such as water use and waste management, the local economic impact and whether local suppliers are used and how they are managed. All these issues are deemed important and the only way to evaluate holiday options holistically is to factor them in.

However, it is also clear that crunching all this information and performing a complete ethical cost-benefits analysis would be an incredibly time-consuming and difficult process. For the vast majority of consumers, who are looking only to do the right thing in the midst of their busy lives, it's never going to happen.

This creates an opportunity for holiday companies that help consumers to evaluate the impact of holidays. This probably means resisting the temptation to inundate them with information and develop a host of labels and standards to denote the low-carbon, the eco-friendly, the locally staffed and so on. Instead, it means defining a total “care rating” that encompasses all of these factors, so that consumers can see, at a glance, how their holiday performs on a social and environmental front. Leaving them free to go back to that all-important culinary debate.

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