Members Practising Sustainable Tourism

Seeing the ‘Big 5’ is one of the main reasons our travellers want to go to Africa. Rhinos are one of the most iconic species of the 5 but some species are critically endangered.

Expert Africa wants to play its part in conserving this incredible animal by working with Save the Rhino. We also aim to bring benefits to those living alongside these magnificent animals.
In 2017, we will begin a partnership with Little Indaba, a women’s group in Lusaka, Zambia that produces and sells organic cotton animal toys. A selection of these are sold via Save the Rhino and a percentage of the sales support rhino conservation locally and globally.
Expert Africa pledges £5,000 to help financially support Little Indaba. We will also contribute our time, in terms of business expertise and marketing support. We aim to help grow the group’s business sustainably, enabling them to reach more local women. Ultimately, this will raise more funds for the women themselves and more investments for Save the Rhino’s vital conservation work.

We also pledge to make a financial contribution of around £15,000 throughout 2018 to community-based projects linked with different aspects of conservation in Botswana, Namibia and Tanzania, which are some of the countries most visited by our travellers.

We will actively promote these projects to our travellers, online and via social media. Increasing our own knowledge of conservation efforts in our key destinations will enable us to provide a better service, and also play a part in safeguarding the preservation of these wonderful species.

We work with the Kate Farrer Foundation to support their partnership with ChemU in Uganda - an education for all programme which is very close to our hearts. As well as ad hoc help, we sponsor five young people to complete their secondary education as part of this programme. Promise is one of these young people - here she is with her father, receiving an award for her excellent performance in primary school. With our help she started secondary school in 2017.

As a family specialist tour operator, Bushbaby loves creating experiences that inspire lifelong memories. Our values of love, integrity, family and enrichment put responsible tourism at the heart of what we do and a natural focus for us is access to education. We work with many lodges that are owned by or which support their local community, especially youth programmes. We are promoting Waterberry Lodge in Zambia and particularly value their community schooling focus. In 2017/18, in partnership with the lodge, we will be working on a menstrual health project which will directly benefit girls in Grade 5 and above at Twabuka Commmunity School. Lack of modern sanitary wear and cultural taboos around periods have led to girls missing school. By providing 100 girls with a kit, composing eco-friendly, reusable and washable sanitary pads as well as underwear and information on puberty and self-care, the aim is to improve school attendance amongst this demographic. Each kit will cost £20 to buy and last at least 2 years. Bushbaby will help produce literature to support the roll-out and will contribute a multi-pack of underwear for each kit. We plan to visit the project and encourage clients staying at the lodge to find out more, visit the school and ‘pack to protect’ as well as sharing updates through our newsletters and website.

We love introducing new destinations to our clients and by choosing Bushbaby they in turn demonstrate support for our shared values, sustainable tourism and meaningful community engagement.

In 2017/18 Just Grenada will harness the generosity of its customers to provide educational aid for children in the Caribbean. We have been doing this in an informal way for a number of years by asking clients to donate particular items suitable for use by underprivileged children through the "Pack for a Purpose" initiative.
This year we want additionally to set up our own scheme to ensure that our clients' support is targeted in a more specific way and directed where it will be most effective.
We will identify one educational establishment in a deprived area in Grenada and another in Bequia and we will ask each head teacher to prepare a costed "wish list" of essential supplies and educational aids that the particular school requires. We will then ask each person who books with us to make a donation towards this fund. Just Grenada will add at least £10 of our own to each donation to help boost the fund still further.
We hope the scheme will produce between £3000-4000 each year.
The total amount will then be divided between the establishments we have chosen according to a percentage proportion which will correlate with the turnover we achieve in each island.
We will ask for confirmation of what has been purchased for the children including photos and feedback from the schools.
We at Just Grenada will keep our clients informed of the progress by posting news and pictures of what is being achieved in each establishment on our website and social media and we will continue to support "Pack for a Purpose"

• In Grenada we will support Samaritan Presbyterian School in St Mark's parish plus the Grenada Community Library in the capital St George's.
• In Bequia we will also support the Sunshine School of Bequia.

Nepal is one of KE Adventure Travel’s top destinations. Our customers love to travel there! It is also a place close to our hearts, so when it was hit by the devastating earthquake in April 2015 we wanted to do all we could to help this remarkable country get back on its feet. We asked our clients for donations and had an amazing response, raising £165,000 with which we built 10 new schools through The Juniper Trust.
Now just over 2 years later Nepal is no longer in the headlines but it is still in need of our help. Our pledge for 2017 is therefore to raise at least £5,000 to put towards school maintenance and the continuous requests for educational items so that we can continue to help provide the young children with the best schooling possible. By helping to teach them we are contributing towards a better future for Nepal and its subsequent generations.
We hope to achieve this by doing the following:

• empowering our customers with the option to forgo their free gift and to choose a donation to the Juniper Trust.
• involving our clients in this objective, so that the value of their holiday experience has been increased.

About 10 years ago Oasis Overland’s Director was delivering surplus blankets to a children’s home in Zimbabwe. He went to the wrong Home by mistake -one for older children that received very little outside support. Whilst there he got talking to the staff – this was the start of what turned out to be a great relationship.
Over the years we realised that many of the children in the home very rarely leave the compound and this formed the basis of an idea. As a company we have our own Expedition vehicles and drivers. Why not use our assets to open up the world a little bit for these children?
This year we will use our vehicles and crew to take all 100 children and home staff on a day trip – to a local game reserve. Oasis Overland will provide vehicles, fuel, staff, insurances and general logistics and we will end the event with a big party for the children. We have also formed a partnership with Responsibletravel.com who will fund entrance fees and lunch through their ‘Trip for a Trip’ scheme. If the partnership is a success we hope to expand it to another of our destinations next year. Every client that books a trip with us this year will indirectly be contributing to this trip for these young people. We are also going to ask our clients travelling in Zimbabwe to donate to new play equipment for the children. We know that this trip will leave the children with lasting positive memories and a real sense of excitement in the build up to the day, and the day itself.

• A few days before Christmas 2017 we will take all the children and staff out for a day trip to a Rhino and Wildlife Conservation area, ending the trip with a big party!
• The children and staff are already aware and excited about the trip!

Here at Explore we know that our leaders have a huge impact on our customers’ experiences and really help to make their trips memorable. We currently have a lot more male leaders than we do female. We asked our local agents and female leaders in Burma and Vietnam what obstacles they face in becoming a leader or employing female leaders.
Explore want to break the stereotype that women cannot become tour leaders, we want to challenge the status quo by empowering and encouraging women in tour leader roles. Our goal by the end of 2017 is to have at least 9 females attend Explore training altogether in India, Vietnam and Sri Lanka, to help improve awareness and equality. We will do this by building on our strong relationships with our local agents and engaging with local stakeholders.
Last year Explore trained 282 new leaders and of those only 88 were female. We want women to know that they have equal rights in the tourism industry and especially within Explore; they will have the same pay, the same training and the same support which male leaders receive.
An increase in female trainees will change the way women are perceived by our male leader trainees. This in turn will influence local guides and drivers to show more equality. Our customers will be able to witness and benefit from this positive shift when they travel with us on these tours in the future. They will be proud to travel with tour operator who is helping to promote equal opportunity.

• Last year Explore trained 282 new leaders and of those only 88 were female.
• Our goal by the end of 2017 is to have at least 9 females attend Explore training altogether in India, Vietnam and Sri Lanka.

“Keep Hydrated”. This is the key piece of advice our Tour Leaders and guides from Journey Latin America provide to our customers. Whether it is in the humid tropics of Central America, the windswept plains of Patagonia or the high altitude plains of the Andes having a filled water bottle close to hand is a simple and effective way to keeping healthy and alert while on tour. The knock on affect of this is that numerous bottles of mineral water are bought and consumed daily considering the water from the tap is not drinkable. This in turn leads to huge amounts of plastic waste which, as widely reported, has reached critical levels for the environment.
Journey Latin America want to combat this by offering our group tour passengers the opportunity to purchase a Water Bottle with an extremely effective water filtration system at a 50% discount. We will monitor the impact by asking our tour leaders to note how many bottles of water would otherwise have been used. We envisage that every customer taking one of these bottles with them on tour will mean on average 10 less bottles bought and discarded per person per trip. We hope to reach at least 80% of our group tour passengers (approximately 600 clients) in the first year of the pledge and then expand the initiative to include our passengers on Tailor Made trips, of which we book over 2,000 a year. We feel this is an effective and tangible way of reducing the plastic waste in the continent we care so deeply about while also including our customers in the fight against the polluting of these incredible destinations.

• - We want to help reduce plastic waste from discarded water bottles in all of our destinations
• - The program involves everyone from our clients, tour leaders and office staff with the aim to also include our suppliers.

The Mountain Company would like to thank our guides and trekkers for enthusiastically embracing our AITO Project Protect pledge to help make the environment in the Himalaya and Karakoram cleaner. Our initial pledge was to remove 220kg of rubbish, and this was exceeded with a total of over 350kg removed from trekking routes in Nepal, Bhutan, India and Pakistan.

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