Jordan budget tour, one week

Planet

We are rolling out a program of using large water canisters on our tour vehicles instead of supplying small water bottles.

We know that tourism and the development required to support it will always have some kind of impact on the local environment and ecosystems. It is our duty as tour operators, and as travelers, to strive to ensure that we support and make positive impacts, while also aiming to reduce any negative impacts as much as possible. We know that making the positive difference we aim to achieve will not be an easy task.

The impacts we have as travelers, and operators, extend beyond the immediate locations we travel to, and include our office operations, the way we travel between places, the things we buy and use in destinations, and what we take with us and leave behind.

We design our itineraries to avoid domestic flights and the associated CO2 emissions as much as possible, by using overnight sleeper trains or ferries between islands, for example. We also try to design some city tours to be done on foot as much as possible and reduce the amount of driving each day.

Drinking water and the waste associated with single-use plastic water bottles is something we are working hard on in all our destinations. We encourage travelers to bring their own water bottles, and are also rolling out a program of providing large water canisters on group tours instead of small bottles, and offering filtered water bottles to travelers, which can vastly reduce waste generated by our customers on an ongoing basis after their tour with us.

We encourage energy saving on our tours by asking travelers to turn off all air-conditioning, lights, and electronics when leaving their hotel rooms. Littering at any of the sites must also be avoided. If trash cans are not available, we facilitate the collection and later disposal of any waste generated during our tours.

Many of the sites we visit on our tours are seen as natural wonders. We encourage our travelers to treat these sites as such, sticking to marked paths, not picking wild plants or flowers, and avoiding disturbing the local wildlife as much as possible.

For us, Responsible Travel is the only way to travel.

Our office operations have been updated to vastly reduce the amount of paper and ink used, and we have a strict policy of only using recycled paper for printing and recycling and re-using any waste paper produced. By moving to a mainly home-working team, we have also reduced the CO2 emissions we produce through commuter travel

People

We support the Jordanian government’s sustainable tourism strategy and include several stops and visits on our set tours away from the main tourist sites. These include a walking tour of the hilltop town of As-Salt, where the local population have put together a ‘Harmony Trail’ which highlights how the inhabitants of the town of different religions live and work side by side. We also like to include visits, particularly on private or tailor-made tours, to some of the social enterprises springing up in the country, including those on the Meaningful Travel Map of Jordan, which was designed and launched in partnership with Tourism Cares. Some of our tours include a homestay in the village of Rasoun, which supports the people in the village and gives our travelers more of an interaction with the local population.

Our Jordan tours are all run by local Jordanian guides, and we support the Bedouin population in Wadi Rum by using smaller locally-owned camps inside the desert reserve and using only Bedouin jeeps for safaris there. Some tours also include a longer interaction with some of the Bedouin shepherds in the deserts around Wadi Rum.Throughout our long tourism business journey, exceeding 20 years of operations in the Middle East and Asia in particular, we have succeeded in establishing strong links with many of the communities we are dealing with in our host destinations.

We believe that the Responsible Travel concept has to be a two-way strategy, with both the travelers and the local community gaining benefits. We benefit the local communities we visit using a wide scope of activities that have a positive impact on the local economy, directly by donating money to charity organizations, financially supporting some local communities and by recruiting employees who belonging to the local community. We aim to use locally-owned hotels instead of international chains, and encourage our guests to buy local products and make use of services provided in the communities they travel through. We help indirectly through the experiences and cultural exchanges that take place between the local population and the travelers during our tours.

We promise to try to support the local community of every destination we take our travelers to. We do this by employing local guides, using local handicraft shops, and recommending shops to our travelers so that their vacation spending contributes to the people of that country. Furthermore, we provide each traveler with a tipping guide or arrange a tipping kitty that will help to ensure that those numerous people working hard to make sure our vacations run smoothly and are a great experience, are rewarded as they should be.

We also try to consider the social and cultural aspects of the local community and how to respect the customs and traditions of its inhabitants. Our tour notes will provide advance information on dress codes and particular local customs, and our guides will expand on this in their explanations during the tour. This means we can create valuable and rewarding opportunities for our travelers and allow local people to mingle and exchange ideas and thoughts without causing any unintended offence.

By creating long-lasting relationships with our local ground handling agents and partners, and ensuring our sales consultants visit the destinations they are selling, we are able to establish what needs the communities we visit have, and ensure that our travelers are also informed appropriately.