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Podcast: Train Hugger’s green vision for rail travel

By Andrew Sheivachman
| October 02, 2025 |
Innovation

Train Hugger offers a unique value proposition – for every corporate or leisure rail trip booked through their site, they will plant a tree, further boosting the sustainability benefits of traveling by rail. 

For a recent episode of The Travel Is a Human Emotion Podcast, Spotnana SVP of Marketing Justin Schuster spoke with Edmund Caldecott, CEO of Train Hugger, and Felix Tanzer, co-founder at Train Hugger, to discuss their innovative business model. 

Caldecott and Tanzer detailed the company’s unique approach to tree-planting, the importance of making sustainability tangible to travelers, and how their partnership with Spotnana provides the technological foundation for their mission.

One booking, one tree

Train Hugger is a rail booking platform that combines a seamless booking experience with a unique sustainability offering. Built on Spotnana’s technology, Train Hugger’s self-service booking site for corporations makes it easy for businesses to book, cancel, and change their rail tickets, manage policies, and view real-time analytics.

The company’s core sustainability promise is simple: for every ticket a company buys, Train Hugger plants a tree. This is accomplished through a partnership with the Royal Forestry Society (RFS), a UK-based charity with 4,000 members. 

“Every time a business purchases a ticket, we put money into a grant that we set up with the RFS,” Tanzer explained. The members can then apply for grants to fund the cost of planting trees. In short, one booking equals one tree.”

Business travelers can book rail tickets using Train Hugger as a corporate rail booking tool, TMCs are providing Train Hugger to clients for rail bookings, and consumers can book trips as well through a separate integration with Trainline.

“TMCs want to be able to offer customers really good technology, and you can do that via the Train Hugger platform with a really nice sustainability hook,” said Tanzer. “The self-service tech is really good. We make life easier for TMCs because they’re not going to be called up to do as much servicing.” 

A ‘sustainable sandwich’

The idea for Train Hugger began with the ambition to plant lots of trees. Co-Founders Caldecott and Tanzer met at university and were inspired to connect tree planting to a business model years later. With Caldecott’s 15 years of experience building software for UK rail companies, rail seemed like a natural fit.

The founders wanted to create a new kind of travel reward that would resonate with both consumers and corporations. 

“The sustainable sandwich sounds good, but if the technology lets you down, and it’s harder or it’s more expensive, companies don’t want to do it,” Caldecott said. The “lightbulb moment” came when they found Spotnana, which provided the cutting-edge technology essential to their vision.

Train Hugger’s unique offering for corporate customers is built on four key pillars:

  • Technology: The best technology available, powered by Spotnana.
  • Sustainability: A unique and tangible tree-planting offering.
  • Account Management: Deep rail industry expertise to help customers with everything from delays and repayments to refunds.
  • Pricing: Best available prices due to split ticketing functionality via Spotnana.

A core part of Train Hugger’s philosophy is avoiding greenwashing by making its sustainability efforts personal and relatable.

The company focuses on planting trees locally, so a customer can be told not just that a tree was planted, but that it was “a rowan in Hampshire or a chestnut in Caernarvonshire.” 

In some cases, clients and their teams even go out and plant the trees themselves, making the woodland their own.

Connecting travel to human emotion

When asked about the connection between travel and human emotion, the founders noted that travel can rapidly inspire two very different feelings. 

The first is the “absolute joy” of having uninterrupted time to yourself on a journey. The second is the “visceral emotion that you can’t control” when something goes wrong, like an unexplained delay.

Caldecott sees an opportunity to reduce the fear factor that is always present when traveling. He argued that in an age where travelers are used to having information instantly, providing clarity is key. 

“The worst thing that you can possibly do to someone who is traveling is tell them there’s going to be a delay, but you’re not going to tell them why,” he said. By serving as a single source of truth during disruptions, travel technology platforms can hold the traveler’s hand and mitigate negative emotions, creating a fundamentally better experience.

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Andrew Sheivachman

Andrew leads content marketing at Spotnana. He works with internal stakeholders and external partners to develop and execute content strategies that support Spotnana’s marketing efforts throughout the customer journey.

Prior to Spotnana he served in senior editorial roles at Skift and as an editor at Travel Market Report and Questex Hospitality & Travel Group. Andrew holds a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.