Welcome to our first Responsible Tourism Report

By Justin Francis - 09 September 2009

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Our business is committed to the twin aims of being financially successful and playing our part in reinventing the tourism industry to make it fairer, more responsible and more
sustainable.

We’ve been working hard at responsible tourism since 2001. We’ve learnt a lot, but we’ve got a lot more to learn and are far from
perfect. Our key principles are to be transparent about what we are trying to do, and to create feedback loops so that we can learn and improve.

We are, I believe, the only travel agent which first screens, and then transparently provides tourists with specific responsible tourism information for every single holiday that we
market on our site.

Since our launch we’ve had a reviews system in place where we invite tourists to report back on ways to improve the responsibility of the holidays. We send this feedback to the
holiday provider; publish the unedited holiday reviews transparently on the site; and remove holidays and operators that do not meet our criteria.

We now want to extend this transparency by publishing a fuller account of all our impacts as a business, and to ask for your feedback and suggestions. In doing so we are setting
some targets for the future, and we will report on our progress towards these targets in a year.

Corporate Social Responsibility Audits are not new. I worked on them at The Body Shop 10 years ago, and they had been producing them for 10 years before that. A few of the very large, publicly quoted tourism businesses have recently produced such audits. However, we do not believe that responsible tourism reporting is the preserve of large businesses – it is necessary for all of us in tourism committed to positive change.

Read the full PDF report here

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