Your journey: people and the planet
This doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of lots of small decisions – which guide, which lodge, which route, which project to support – made long before you pack your bags. We’ve spent over four decades building those decisions into the way we work, inspecting the places we take you, choosing partners who share our standards, and helping you towards the more responsible choices.
Being a responsible business and creating authentic, purposeful trips go hand in hand – one makes the other better. Here’s how we approach it, across the two things that shape every journey we plan: the planet, and its people.
Our planet
The wild landscapes of Latin America and Antarctica are the reason many people travel here in the first place, and simply visiting can help defend them: important national parks and archaeological sites become worth protecting when local governments and communities see their value. Many of our partners engage with conservation and protect biodiversity, and we can guide you to quieter corners every bit as rewarding as the busy ones, easing the pressure on the places everyone else is heading for.
Seeing wildlife the right way
The wildlife is a huge part of the draw, and how you see it matters. We hold ourselves to a strict animal welfare policy on every trip, favouring wildlife in the wild over captivity and never including an experience that puts an animal at risk.From the pumas and condors returning to the national parks we help protect in Patagonia, to the sea turtles you might spot coming ashore to nest on a quiet stretch of Pacific coast, we look for ways for your visit to do some good rather than harm. Track jaguar with specialist biologists in Brazil’s Pantanal, or birdwatch across the rewilded Iberá wetlands, and your trip gives species and habitat real economic value, and puts conservation-based work into local hands.
Our climate impact
For every traveller who books with us, we also contribute to Patagonian rewilding, which is being achieved on an extraordinary scale – read more under Beyond holidays: Giving back to Latin America.Closer to home, we’re a signatory of the Glasgow Declaration on Climate Action in Tourism and are working to reduce our emissions year on year.
Cutting out plastic
From mountain valleys to the oceans, plastic waste remains a concern worldwide, and many of the places in which we travel simply do not have the ability to handle this waste the way we do at home.We are working with our ground teams to reduce our dependence on single-use plastics, where possible, favouring refill points over throwaway bottles, and packed lunches wrapped in banana leaves with some of our partners in the Amazon.
We’re not there yet – too much plastic packaging and water bottles are used worldwide – but small steps make a big difference. To help, we give every client 15% off our very own Journey Latin America filtered Water to Go bottles, so refilling is easy wherever you are.
Our people
Partners who share our values
Travel is only ever as good as the people who make it happen, and its rewards should reach all of them – from the guides, drivers and families you meet to our own team.Our partnerships are the heart of what we do: we work with local people, hotels and businesses, so more of what you spend stays in the communities you visit, and we hold clear policies on human rights, child welfare and fair working conditions. Our tour leaders are chosen for their knowledge of, and love for, the region they’re showing you and they will often include additional elements that support the places we visit, like taking you slightly off the beaten track, suggesting family-run restaurants, and helping you not just see, but understand, the places we visit.
Experiences that give back
We seek out community-run experiences that put your money straight into local handsSpend a day with the Yunguilla community in Ecuador’s cloud forest – former loggers, now running their own ecotourism project; stay with Quichua families in Ecuador’s Amazon; visit remote river communities in the Brazilian Amazon’s Mamirauá Reserve; in Colombia, walk through Medellín’s Moravia with guides who grew up on this former municipal dump and have since transformed it into a thriving flower-filled community; or learn to make pupusas from cooks on El Salvador’s Pacific coast. It’s a list that keeps growing, from chocolate tours with Panamanian farmers to rural homestays in Oaxaca, Mexico. And we lean on decades of first-hand knowledge to point you somewhere quieter and more rewarding than the standard trails, sharing what we know through your briefing dossier and personal travel app.
It starts at home
None of it works unless we start with our own team. Our Impact committee, made up of people from across the business, keeps us focused on seeking ways to do better.And while we handle the choices behind the scenes, there’s plenty you can do on the ground too, from refilling a water bottle to buying direct from a local business while travelling with us. We’ll point the way where we can.
Your journey
Travelling responsibly takes more than good intentions. Through putting together focused policies and tracking our progress with evidence, we aim for best practices to run throughout our business.We share clear standards with our local partners, regularly train our teams, review how we operate on a regular basis, and are always looking for ways to do better.
Our Embedding sustainability framework and Responsible Journey policies show how we thread these aims though everything we do, and how this quiet groundwork weaves through each holiday we plan. It’s these positive actions we measure ourselves against, and it’s what turns our desire to organize Responsible Journeys to Latin America and Antarctica into something tangible.