Down to earth holidays

Responsible Travel

How what you do on your holiday really can
MAKE A DIFFERENCE

Where you go and what you do on your holiday makes a difference to your personal happiness and well-being. But without costing you extra, your holiday can also help people in need and back valuable conservation projects.

Your holiday will benefit you, but it can also benefit the people, environment and wildlife of the country you're visiting. How?

I'm sure we'd all agree that we take a holiday to please ourselves - for relaxation, for an escape from everyday routine, for our curiosity in the world around us. However that doesn't mean that we can't make our holidays work hard for others at the same time. We have the choice of what we spend our money on - where we go, what places we stay in, what experiences we try. All this and more can have a positive impact.

At Down to Earth holidays we are all travellers ourselves, and we believe in giving something back to the places that give us so much enjoyment.

Here are key ways that our holidays help:

Our holidays provide authentic experiences allowing for a positive relationship between you and the local culture and environment.

We know these destinations very well, and choose the activities, services, people we work with and accommodation very carefully. So we can give you a genuinely good experience.
Where possible accommodation is locally-owned or run, and we prefer to use places with good social / environmental credentials (yes, we check, though this is an ongoing process).

Our partners within the country are people we know and whose ethics we trust. Many are leaders in their country in terms of sustainable tourism. They care about their country.

The experiences we include or recommend fall into two camps:
1) Simply wonderful things to do or see. 
2) Experiences which get you closer to local culture, such as learning cooking in an African township, which not only fosters friendships and respect, but brings money directly to local people.

We plant trees in deforested areas for every person that travels with us. 

Why? As a travel company which obviously encourages air travel, we believe we have a responsibility to consider the impact of this. We plant trees via The Travel Forest scheme to encourage biodiversity and to fight against rampant deforestation of the planet. Call it a carbon offset project, or maybe just call it our small contribution to our planet’s strained ecosystem. Currently we plant in northern Malawi working with local communities. The cost of the saplings comes off our profit and is not added to your holiday.

We back small grassroots projects.

We do this through The Tribes Foundation. There are a couple of example projects below, or you can see lots more on the website (the-tribes-foundation.org). Funds for this are not added to your holiday cost, though we would hugely welcome any donation, and promise to put your money to very good use.

 

How particular trips help

Many, in fact, most of our holidays benefit the local people, wildlife or environment in some way. You'll find details about this under the responsible travel section of each holiday. The few that don't have anything specific are nonetheless still helping, as we still plant trees and back the Tribes Foundation through sales of all our holidays.

 

Our sustainable tourism credentials

Being a part of Tribes Travel, Down to Earth holidays is run on the same ethics and principles. We are multi award-winners of international and British awards for responsible and sustainable ecotourism.
For more details about this, please see our relevant page on the Tribes website.