Wanderlust Club
Right now, the world isn't travelling, but when it starts to: it's time to go green! Here, we highlight just a few of the excellent tour operators making it their mission to travel responsibly…
As written in our special Travel Green issue of Wanderlust magazine, your choices about who you travel with are often as important as how you travel.
Do your research and pick ethical tour operators who are also working to protect the planet. You want to be travelling with companies who respect people and nature. Smaller tours have less impact on the environment – and consider using local tour companies, too.
As well as ensuring they are carbon balanced, Steppes Travel run the Steppes Fund for Change.
Book any trip and £25 of your money goes towards funding women’s empowerment and wildlife conservation programmes, with another £25 going towards a UK tree-planting scheme and a nuclear fusion researcher at Oxford University.
Where do they go? Steppes Travel offer tailor-made trips, luxury holidays and safaris. There are a mix of over 100 destinations on offer, including Gabon, The Grenadines, Mauritius, Mexico, Namibia and the North Pole, just to name a few.
G Adventures set up the not-for-profit Planeterra Foundation in 2003 to help the communities affected by the social and environmental impacts of tourism, by empowering them to develop and conserve their own culture.
A Wanderlust partner, we’ve highlighted the positive impact of the Planeterra Foundation’s community work and their Ripple Score initiative.
Where do they go? G Adventures offers a mix of award-winning group tours, embracing authentic accommodation and local transportation on the ground. Just a few of the trips you can view (and book) via our Trip Finder include tailor-made Peruvian adventures, trips to the Serengeti, Zanzibar, Sri Lanka, New Zealand and the USA’s national parks.
Since 2001, Responsible Travel has been an agency representing eco-friendly tours and trips that focus on local culture and people, independent businesses and wildlife conservation. The organisation also campaigns for positive change through its ‘give back’ programme.
Where do they go? If there’s an eco adventure to be had, you’ll likely find it in one of Responsible Travels’ 6,000 tours. There are destinations in just about every content, from lesser-visited Pacific Ocean islands, eco-paradises in Central America, to the major European and USA hot spots.
Carbon neutral since 2010, Intrepid was the first global tour operator to end elephant rides. Now, with their not-for-profit Intrepid Foundation, they’re also investing into a project in Tasmania, Australia to help restore kelp forests (pictured top), among other things.
A Wanderlust partner, we’ve also highlighted their successful efforts to double their number of female tour guides.
Where do they go? Known for the small group trips, guided by local leaders, Intrepid can take you across all seven continents, with countries ranging from Morocco and Tanzania, Ecuador and Guatemala, to India, Central Asia and beyond.
Audley Travel work closely with local communities to ensure responsible travel is at the heart of what they go. The operator has an animal welfare and sustainability policy, and its charity of the year for 2020 to 2021 is Plastic Oceans UK.
Where do they go? Audley Travel arranges tailor-made getaways and excursions to over 80 countries, throughout Asia, Africa, Arabia, Latin America, Australasia, Canada, Alaska, the Arctic and Antarctica. Essentially, the world is your oyster.
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