55 independent reviews for Thailand tailor made vacation, elephants, jungle & beach

Thankyou for your review Egle and we’re happy to hear you enjoyed the “no-touch” elephant sanctuary so much. Thanks to years of campaigning and travelers demanding better welfare, the industry in Thailand is starting to move towards elephant experiences that are as natural as possible and we’re proud to be part of this change. You noted that there is room for improvement to be sustainable and we totally agree – there will always be more that can be done. Except perhaps at the luxury end, Thailand is still some way behind in terms of sustainability and responsible travel is still relatively niche there. Responsible principles and practices are filtering down to the mid range and more locally owned suppliers we work with, we will continue to push them wherever we can and support these changes in the years ahead.

Hi Stephen, I’m glad that everything ran smoothly and you liked the hotels so much and your comments about the guides and activities are exactly what we like to hear. We strive for excellence in our vacations and as a founder of our company it means a lot when our customers are so positive about what we do. You asked about the how we assess the sustainability of the vacation and the short answer is that there unfortunately is no global, or even regional set of standards for Asia. Some national schemes exist like Green Leaf in Thailand, but the criteria are opaque and it’s hard to know if they are reliable or rigorous. The closest thing there is to a globally-recognised standard is Travelife, which we and our local partner are members of. This includes assessing the impact of multiple environmental and social aspects of their vacations as well as audits. Therefore lots goes on behind the scenes, for example in the way the guides are employed and how hotels are assessed when they are regularly visited by our partners, which wouldn’t be immediately obvious. I also often use hotels that we have personally visited and assessed by talking at length with the managers about sustainability. I agree that this could be communicated better across the industry but sadly it’s still not a priority for most hotels especially in developing countries. Without a strong commercial imperative as demonstrated by customer demand (which is where we try to push as much as possible), there isn’t much incentive to do the considerable amount of work on developing sustainability and monitoring and communicating it – where it does exist it’s really about reducing costs for hotels like how much water and detergent they use for cleaning, how long the lights are on etc. This is ad hoc and used internally, so it’s very hard to present a single set of ratings that mean something to customers. Ultimately there are so many complexities in a service-based industry with complicated supply chains, with specificities across global locations, that any certifications are focused on helping tourism businesses along a sustainability journey and improvement in their own particular situation, rather than a consumer-facing set of ratings. Not that lots of people haven’t tried and are still trying to bring it together! Regarding water, it would be great if there were a network of refilling spots but as you’ve seen habits have been slow to change and in the absence of clean piped water most Thais use bottled water. Our partners did look at having water in the vehicles but it hasn’t worked out yet because it actually ends up wasting a lot of water, so they are working on other solutions. We are also sourcing refillable bottles to give to each of our customers as well as advising to bring your own, for when it is possible to find places to refill. Due to the nature of the experiences in our vacations we do work with local transport providers who often use polluting vehicles like the longtails and tuktuks. However our partner’s vans that you travelled in should meet high standards for efficiency as part of the Travelife certification. You may also like to know that they offset all the emissions generated by the tour automatically.

"Thankyou for your comments are we're happy to hear you enjoyed the vacation. Our ethos is to create vacations that have positive impacts, without those being the defining feature. We do a lot of behind the scene work to build in environmental benefits throughout your vacation in ways you might not notice, especially the hotels. We chose ones that actively reduce their impact by (amongst others) recycling materials, reusing kitchen and garden waste, reducing energy and water usage and sourcing food locally. The Elephant Nature Park is also a wonderful experience in itself and helps support ongoing work to improve the lives of Thailand's elephants. Social responsibility is equally important to us, for example we included the lodge because of its support for the Lisu culture and the jobs it has created in the local community. Thanks again for your comments and we hope we can help again in future."