Members Practising Sustainable Tourism

Plastic waste is becoming an increasing problem in travel. In 2018 KE want to help prevent this and ensure sites remain beautiful for all to enjoy by making an official commitment to reducing single-use plastics and by encouraging the use of other reusable items.

We will educate clients on the effects of using non-reusable items. Our kit-lists and pre trip information will remind all of their clients to take their own water bottle and a non-plastic reusable bag. We will begin to establish links with companies who provide alternatives to single-use products so we can provide a customer discount and empower them to buy reusable items.

We will also inform our ground agents that reducing single-use plastic is a priority and work with them to resolve any issues surrounding this. We want 70% of agents to agree to stop providing single-use plastic bottles on their trips within the year. This will prevent the use of around 10000 plastic bottles.

Finally, we want to start lead by example at our HQ. New guidelines and access to discounts will persuade at least 70% of our 34 members of staff to use alternatives for plastic bottles and single-use coffee cups. We will also take part in at least one local litter pick, starting with The Great Cumbrian Litter Pick, and better promote our efforts to protect the planet by improving our responsible travel web pages.

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Here at Bamboo Travel we care deeply about the countries in which we operate. There are a number of worthwhile projects already being run in these destinations which support the sustainable tourism ethos. Our aim is to create a range of travel experiences incorporating these projects, which our clients can add to their tailor-made tour.

In 2018 we will introduce two experiences from four of our main destinations. In Cambodia we selected a tuk-tuk foodie tour of Siem Reap which supports training restaurants for underprivileged young adults, and in India, clients will be able to take part in a walking tour of Delhi conducted by former street kids. Similar projects will also be chosen for Laos and Sri Lanka. These tours, many run by not-for-profit organisations, invest in the community by providing employment and training for local people, and our clients can make a direct impact by taking part.

By the end of the year we will have eight experiences in total, which will be detailed on our new Sustainable Tourism webpage along with information on how clients can get involved and how they can make a difference.

We are aiming for a minimum of 100 clients to take part in these tours over the coming year. In addition to this, for every Sustainable Tourism experience booked, we will donate $10 per person to the Safe Haven Children’s Charity in Cambodia, a project we have supported for a number of years. This will generate an additional $1,000 in donations.

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In 2017, Experience Travel Group identified three social enterprise restaurants that we wished to support in Vietnam, Myanmar and Cambodia. We redesigned our tours in Hoi An, Lake Inle and Phomh Penh to include a lunch at one of these restaurants and we exceeded our pledge to send 150 clients during the year. Each client who visited enjoyed a tasty meal while benefitting an organisation that invests in the future of vulnerable youth in the local community. We feel that supporting these organisations is a sustainable way in which tourism can have a powerful and positive social impact.

Our 2018 pledge is to expand our collaboration with these restaurants and involve more of our clients. We’ve identified three additional social enterprises: Fair Warung Bali in Bali, Hope Cafe in India and Friends in Laos. We pledge to send a total of 200 clients by the end of the year creating an estimated $6000 in revenue for them. This is the equivalent to the cost of providing education and training support for three trainees.

We also aim to collaborate more closely with our in-country partners on this project in order to get regular feedback and be able to share information about the work of these social enterprises with our staff and 60,000-strong contact database. This will promote the values of sustainable travel to a wider audience and demonstrate how tourists can have a positive social and economic impact on the communities they visit, in way that enriches their own travel experience.

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In 2018, we will ask each trekker booked onto a trip with us to pick up one kilogram of rubbish. During 2018 we will have approximately 200 trekkers travelling with one of our groups in Nepal, Pakistan, Bhutan and India and we will therefore pick up at least 200kg of litter.

"Take nothing but pictures. Leave nothing but footprints.” This is part of the Leave No Trace philosophy encouraging people to minimise their environmental impact when exploring the great outdoors. At The Mountain Company we want to go further by picking up rubbish found along the trekking trails and around the campsites. We have received client feedback that rubbish is a big problem and this unsightly mess has detracted from their holiday experience. By picking up litter this activity will make the environment cleaner and will help to maintain the natural beauty of the Himalaya and Karakoram mountains.

• Our groups will talk to others to explain what they are doing aiming to inspire more trekkers to pick up rubbish too.
• Our long-term goal is to make this the standard procedure for all our groups.

In many of the destinations we visit, we find the land and waterways littered with plastic bottles. At Dragoman Overland we are committed to the reduction of plastic waste and we actively encourage our customers to use refillable water bottles and the drinking water supplied on our trucks. However, we also wish to reduce the number of plastic bottles purchased by our clients, when away from the truck, by offering our clients the opportunity to purchase a Water-to-Go bottle at a discounted price. This bottle has a filtration system, thus enabling our clients to have access to clean potable water when away from the truck without adding to plastic pollution within the destination.

By the end of 2018, we will ensure that all 80 of our crew and office staff are issued with WTG bottles so they can actively encourage our clients to purchase these bottles for use on our trips. We will also highlight the benefits of these reusable bottles on our website, in our confirmation emails to our clients and in our newsletters.
We will monitor the number of bottles purchased and estimate that each bottle purchased will save on average at least three disposable water bottles per trip week. It is our aim that 5% of our clients will purchase WTG bottles annually.

We hope that these measures will help out clients to continue to refuse to purchase water in single use plastic bottles on their future travels, thus reducing the amount of plastic waste that is created.

• Reduced waste of single use bottles
• Allows access to clean potable water
• Discount available through Dragoman website of 25% off

Journey Latin America currently supports The LATA Foundation, a UK-based charity that supports grassroots social and environmental projects throughout Latin America. These projects are carefully chosen and always aim to relieve poverty through sustainable development and environmental conservation. Over the past 10 years the Foundation has upheld this aim through a number of different initiatives. Projects supported include the provision of clean drinking water fountains to schools around Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, free dental care for hundreds of children in the ‘villas’ of Buenos Aires and the planting of more than 30,000 native trees in the Sacred Valley of Peru by local communities. The Foundation is also able to support emergency relief to affected areas through working with trusted local organisations.

• The projects are usually located in areas where tourism is high and fall into four categories:
• Education and training
• Health
• Community development
• Conservation

Undiscovered Destinations is supporting Fonkoze, Haiti’s leading microfinance institution, to help empower Haitians—primarily women—to lift themselves and their families out of poverty. We aim to raise $1,500 during 2018 that will directly support their ‘Staircase Out of Poverty’ initiative, a comprehensive, four step approach uniquely designed to provide women with the resources and support needed to ascend from poverty. More information on the four steps is all available at https://fonkoze.org/.

Undiscovered Destinations decided on this pledge because it aligns with our business values and Haiti is a country we have very close links with. By helping us to make this donation, our customers will be able to assist people like Saincia on their journey out of poverty. Read about Saincia climb up the staircase here https://fonkoze.org/saincia.html

Over the past few years Pure Crete’s representatives have noticed an increasing amount of customers asking where they should take their refuse to be recycled. Our holiday houses do not have recycling bins and our customers are used to recycling back home so they find this unusual.
In 2018 Pure Crete has therefore decided to reduce the amount of landfill waste its customers produce by introducing recycling bins into our holiday houses. We aim to increase the recycling by 80% in 50% of our properties by providing them with one bin for plastics, card and tin, and one bin for glass.
Pure Crete will inform individual house owners what the bins are for and explain our intentions and goal. There are recycling points in local villages and towns. We will ask the owners to empty the designated recycle bins there once full. If this is a problem our local staff will offer to assist.
In addition we will design an information sheet in each house for our clients with instructions on how they should dispose of their waste and some information about AITO PROTECT. We will report on our results at the end of October 2018.
By helping us to recycle more waste our customers will be directly involved in reducing landfill on Crete. We hope this will contribute to the enjoyment of our customers’ holiday by giving them a sense of giving something back to the environment of the destination they have visited and enjoyed.

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Travelling in more remote and unspoilt places often means not being able to drink the local water, so travellers often rely on bottled water. While this can be inexpensive and readily available, many destinations don’t have recycling programmes and as such are left with vast amounts of plastic waste that is either sent to landfill or strewn about the countryside.

This is an issue that concerns RWH’s clients and staff because who wants to see a natural beauty spot blighted by litter? So, to help matters we have teamed up with a UK based company called Water to Go to promote the use of a re-usable filtered water bottle that allows travellers to safely drink from local sources without creating more plastic waste. In 2017/18 we aim to sell 1000 reusable bottles at a discounted price. By using one of these filtered bottles on a week holiday, one person alone could save between 14-21 plastic bottles. With every 100 reusable bottles sold, that’s between 1400-2100 bottles!

We will highlight the benefits of these reusable bottles to our clients by providing information at the Adventure Show, Destinations, 50+ travel shows, in over 55 000 brochure mailings and on our website. Water to Go will make a donation to our own staff led charity, Heart & Sole, for each bottle sold. We will then use these funds to support projects around the world, such as a school breakfast club in St Lucia and providing needed items to an orphanage in Costa Rica.

• Reducing plastic waste
• Kinder to the environment
• Promoting sustainable water use
• A benefit to travellers in remote regions