What is Planet Friendly?

It’s often by walking around in the open air that you start exploring a city, don’t you find?

A bus is the ideal way to start exploring, especially in the big capitals. It’s a unique way to enter a new urban universe quickly and simply so you can understand the layout, visualise the different neighbourhoods and have a better overview of the cultural, social and economic wealth of the city.

We live in our city, we love it, we protect it.

Our vision

We are the world’s 1st and only low carbon tourist bus fleet.

We are exploring innovative solutions to save energy and natural resources, and to combat climate change. We are committed to reducing the environmental impact of our operations.

We are a signatory of the Glasgow Declaration for Climate Action in Tourism as part of a concerted effort with industry partners and peers to support halving emissions by 2030 and achieving net zero as soon as possible by 2050.

Our mission

We set ourselves an ambitious objective to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2050 and convert our entire bus fleet to clean energy. We achieved our goal ahead of schedule by accelerating the conversion of our fleet to clean energy.

Our objectives

1. Converting our bus fleet to clean energies

We are already exploring and using all kinds of innovative energies to convert our fleet: electricity, retrofitting, natural gas, biofuels...

2. Combatting waste

Our actions: Reducing waste through digitisation, encouraging our customers to use the Tootbus app rather than paper brochures and tickets, promoting energy efficient habits among our staff and customers, recycling, using materials that can be reused or recycled, training our drivers in eco-driving.

3. Improving quality of life

Our actions: We are enriching the customer experience and making life more comfortable for our customers and local residents by eliminating greenhouse gases to reduce pollution and improve air quality.

4. Raising customer awareness

Our actions: We want our customers to participate in this change and we encourage them to do so through messages in our audio commentaries and bus displays. We are also planning to include carbon footprint indicators on our app.

5. Becoming an opinion leader in the tourism sector

Our actions: Having implemented the energy transition in our fleet, we want to initiate profound change and encourage other tourism companies to replicate our approach.

Renewal and conversion of bus fleets to clean energies.

In Paris

Today, our fleet is ultra-low emission, and our buses that tour the streets of Paris are electric and natural gas (NGV) vehicles.

In addition to the environmental benefits, passengers enjoy a comfortable tour thanks to the eco-responsible driving of all our specially trained drivers.

Paris

Technical challenges, European partners

Tootbus has deliberately chosen European partners to build its new fleet. Operating an ultra-low emission fleet requires transforming a depot to make it suitable for the different types of vehicles. Major investments have been made to install bus chargers and train staff in battery handling.

In London 

Increasing the number of electric buses

We have already made steps towards decarbonising our fleet of open-top sightseeing buses by introducing 3 fully electric vehicles, which are zero carbon emissions at the exhaust pipes. A fourth electric bus will join our fleet in the second half of 2023.

Our objective is to have a fully electric fleet by the end of 2030. This will be done by retro-fitting our current fleet. We have taken these steps as we are fully committed to meeting the Mayor of London’s goal of being carbon neutral by 2030.

Ultra-low emission thanks to biofuel

As we cannot wait for 2030 to reduce our emissions, the entire diesel fleet has been replaced by biofuel.

Biofuel is a combustible liquid made from waste oils. It is a 100% renewable substitute for diesel.

London

What are the advantages of biofuel:

It works better than diesel in cold weather
Cleaner combustion
It reduces CO2 emissions by up to 90% compared to standard fossil fuel diesel
It reduces nitrogen oxide emissions by up to 27%
It reduces particulate emissions by up to 80%

Beyond these benefits, biofuel has proven crucial for improving air quality. With the fleet running on biodiesel, our buses qualify as ultra-low emission vehicles under Transport for London rules.

In Brussels

Tootbus launched in November 2021 with a fleet of 100% electric buses.

A world first!

Brussels

Because we want to act as a responsible brand, we are continuing our efforts to extend our measures to all our cities.

Want to know more about sustainable tourism? We have our first barometer online here

Tootbus Green commitment