Members Practising Sustainable Tourism

The human race manufactures over 300 million tonnes of plastic each year. Half of that plastic is used just ONCE. In the more remote parts of the world which Mountain Kingdoms visits, we see the dire effects of this: recycling facilities are in their infancy and poor waste management has resulted in severe plastic pollution.

From 2019, Mountain Kingdoms will offer clients who are not given a free kit bag (required for certain treks) the choice of receiving either a free filtered water bottle or a free Mountain Kingdoms fleece. This will enable Mountain Kingdoms and its clients to help to reduce plastic waste, thus reducing the amount going into our oceans and helping to keep all the countries we visit beautiful for generations to come.

The NHS recommends drinking at least two litres of water a day, which means clients could be buying 56 single use 500cl bottles on a typical two week trip. Here at Mountain Kingdoms we have teamed up with Water-to-Go which has developed a multi-use drinking bottle with a filtration system that eliminates over 99.9% of all microbiological contaminants from any non-salt water source. In 2019 we estimate we will be giving away 300 water bottles to our clients, which means we could stop around 16,800 single-use plastic bottles being used!

If you book on one of our trips, we will be offering clients, who are not given a free Mountain Kingdoms kit bag (these are required for certain treks), a free water bottle and a further 15% discount on extra bottles and new filters. Find out more information at: https://www.mountainkingdoms.com/news-offers/article/new-water-to-go-reusable-bottle-campaign

• The human race manufactures over 300 million tonnes of plastic each year.
• Free filtered water bottle for each applicable client
• In 2019 we estimate we could help save 16,800 single-use plastic bottle

At Prestige Holidays we have always felt it appropriate to have a social conscience and to share our success with others. Continuing in this tradition, we have decided to help two charities in 2019 who work to help children in different difficult circumstances.

The first of these is a small local charity called Amelia’s Rainbow. They help families with seriously ill children and have very limited funds. Prestige is delighted to be able to help them with their cause by collecting a considerable number of brand new toys for them to distribute to those in their care.

More importantly we celebrate our 30th anniversary party in London on 28 March next year and will seek to raise substantial funds for Amelia’s Rainbow. If you wish to help us donate to this worthy cause you can do so directly at www.ameliasrainbow.org.

In addition, we also want to look further afield and help children in one of our key destinations, Croatia. We pledge to make an annual contribution of €1,000 to the Pegaz Centre, a small charity in Croatia providing equine assisting therapy for children with disabilities or disadvantages to provide recreation, therapy and sport. The Centre will use the money raised to buy additional equipment so that they can continue providing the children they support with important experiences.

• We hope that by working with these two organisations we are helping to bring happiness and hope into the lives of children who are in need in the UK and in Croatia.

CICERONI Travel has visited Rome more than any other destination and has shared its extraordinary cultural heritage with our guests over many years. Its visual arts and architecture continue to inspire all that we do, wherever we are in the world.

The Villa Farnesina in the heart of Rome on the Tiber River is a beacon to that end. Built at the beginning of the sixteenth century, it is one of the most elegant statements of the entire Italian Renaissance. Many hands were involved in creating the Villa, including Raphael. Today it is a museum owned by the distinguished Lincean Academy of Rome

In 2019 CICERONI Travel has teamed up with LoveItaly, a Rome-based non-profit organization, dedicated to the preservation and appreciation of Italy’s unique cultural heritage. Our project is to contribute to the cleaning and restoration of the 'Loggia of the Galatea', one of the rooms within the villa and partly frescoed by Raphael.

Via direct support from CICERONI Travel and from our individual guests, we aim to raise about £3000 annually. We will also involve our guests in the project with the aim of securing additional contributions.

It is a small step in ensuring this extraordinary building can be enjoyed by Romans and visitors alike for decades to come. It is for each one of us at Ciceroni a statement of thanks for all the pleasurable visits we have enjoyed to Villa Farnesina and to Rome.

• *

Following a year of selling Water-to-Go filter bottles to passengers with the aim of reducing plastic waste in our destinations JLA has now decided to take this idea further. We now want to focus on a more local scale with this pledge and to finally achieve our 2017 target of selling 500 bottles.

In 2018, we will establish partnerships with two Destination Management Companies (DMC’s) to help reduce the number of single-use plastic bottles given to our clients during transfers and excursions. Firstly, we will assess how many single-use plastic bottles are used before analysing possible solutions (e.g. refillable water stations in their offices and at different stops on route) and then working with the DMC’s to implement the solutions. We currently offer approximately 60 excursions and 140 transfers through these DMCs which could amount to saving hundreds of single-use plastic bottles. We believe that this will also lead to conversations with DMC’s regarding other single use plastic on excursions such as plastic straws, bags and polystyrene boxes.

In addition to this we will continue with the promotion of our branded Water-To-Go bottles. We will now offer them to Bespoke Clients (70% of our customer base), with the aim to sell 350 bottles by March 2019). Furthermore we will develop our Sustainable Travel webpages to provide clients with information on the hotels we work with that have excellent environmental and social policies and with simple guidelines on the actions clients can take to travel responsibly while on holiday.

• - Work with DMCs to limit their use of single-use plastic in Latin America
• - Continue to sell our Water-To-Go bottles to our clients
• - Update our sustainability pages to include hotels that support eco-friendly practices

Greece is in the blood of the team at Sunvil and GIC The Villa Collection. We have travelled the country, far and wide, since 1969 and are passionate about the culture, history, gastronomy, nature and - above all - the warm and generous people. We care about the islands and the islanders, and we want to preserve their natural and cultural attractions for generations to come.

Over recent years islanders have faced an increasing problem with waste management, exacerbated by a lack of recycling facilities, poor sorting facilities and the closure of landfill sites.

Sunvil and GIC have always strived to mitigate the impacts of our holidays and have used our influence with local businesses and governments to affect change. In 2018 we vow to take our commitment to waste reduction in Greece.

For the 2018 season we have will introduced a waste separation and crushing facility at the Kalami Bay on Corfu, a property exclusive to Sunvil, with the aim to introduce the facility to further 5 units throughout the year. The waste collected will be measured and then transported to the correct facilities and recycled. We will use our figures to educate those in authority and to introduce further facilities for our guests, residents and local businesses. On top of this we will provide reusable bags within a number of our resorts and traveller tips for reducing waste.

• Join with Sunvil and GIC this year to make a notable difference to those who live and work on our favourite holiday isles.

The majority of Oasis Overland trips travel through areas where temperatures mean that keeping hydrated is an essential requirement. We have always encouraged our travellers to bring sturdy, refillable water bottles on the trip with them but some people still choose to buy bottles of mineral water, contributing to the ever mounting problem of plastic waste and its devastating environmental impact.

In 2018/19 Oasis Overland wants to reduce its traveller’s contribution to this problem by offering them the opportunity to purchase a water bottle with an extremely effective water filtration system at a 15% discount. For every bottle purchased via us another 15% will be donated to one of the projects we support. We feel that there is a natural connection between the water bottle donation and Toilet Twinning and hope to twin at least two toilets by the end of 2019.

We envisage that every customer taking one of these bottles will mean that 10 less single-use water bottles are consumed and discarded on a trip. We hope to reach at least 10% of our travellers (approximately 70 people) in the first year of the pledge by including details in our pre departure information, social media posts and newsletter articles.

We feel that introducing these bottles to our customers is an effective and tangible way of reducing plastic consumption and waste as well as protecting the wonderful environments we travel through. We look forward to seeing the positive effect our pledge has.

• Aim to reduce single use plastic bottle waste by encouraging our travellers to purchase and use water filtration bottles

We chose a pledge with an emphasis on animal conservation - it is a topic that resonates with our travellers, & many of them want their trips to focus on wildlife, often the ‘Big 5’.

Narrowing down a specific pledge was challenging, as many of our suppliers already carry out valuable sustainability projects. Our initial plan to work with one initiative unfortunately fell through, but after helpful input from wider members of the team, we chose to support a women’s cooperative in Zambia (Little Ndaba) that crochets toy rhinos, with profits going to Save the Rhino as well as the local community. We’ve previously worked with Save the Rhino and this pledge enabled us to further our collaboration with them.

It was an exciting time when we consolidated our (many!) ideas into a concise pledge, to financially & materially contribute to Little Ndaba. We have been a support network for the very small administration team behind Little Ndaba in terms of the development of their website and brochure materials. We also donated £2,000 to create an updated website and are helping to increase their product exposure by providing our travellers with information about the initiative. “Many thanks again for reaching out to us - what a super Christmas gift!” Charles, Little Ndaba.

We also donated £1,200 to the Tanzanian charity Equality in Tourism (supporting women farmers in rural communities) and $1,050 to Azizi Life (a women’s cooperative in Rwanda, supporting 30 adults to learn how to read and write over 12 months), as part of our commitment to contributing a total of £15,000 to selected charities in Africa throughout the year.
Implementing our pledge has helped us recognise that what may seem like a small commitment from us can make a huge difference to others, and that not only money is required to make a difference, a diverse range of skills can provide invaluable support.

• We aim to develop our pledge over time, as well as set sustainability and charitable principles in place within Expert Africa that will form a solid basis for the foreseeable future.

For our 2017 pledge we had hoped to partner with, or set up, a grassroots project in Africa. However, as the majority of the suppliers we work with already carry out many worthwhile sustainability projects, we found it challenging to pick just one.

As such, for our 2018 pledge, we aim to get a better understanding of the sustainable practices and initiatives that our suppliers have in place. Working in collaboration with Professor Xavier Font and around 180 undergraduates from the University of Surrey’s School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, we will research the sustainability practices of a range of the camps and lodges we offer, across a dozen countries in Africa.

Students are contacting suppliers with the aim to produce a concise case study on an initial 200 properties and their sustainability initiatives over the course of the next year. We have found that our travellers are increasingly more concerned with responsible travel and are looking to book with suppliers leading the field in this respect. We will therefore use the results to add a sustainability section on each lodge on our website highlighting the valuable work they carry out. This will help our travellers make a more informed decision, as well as encouraging an increased focus on sustainable tourism.

We are excited to be supporting these students in their tourism and hospitality management degrees and hope that the opportunity to work with real-world examples will be a valuable addition to the knowledge gained throughout their course.