Everything about our Partnership with Travelife

“The Travelife initiative is based on the central role of tour operators and travel agents in the tourism supply chain. Their unique position between suppliers and buyers enables them to influence consumer demand, procurement policies and the development of destinations. This allows them to contribute significantly to sustainable development and environmental and cultural protection in destinations. Travelife aims to offer companies the knowledge, solutions and tools to implement positive change within their businesses and their supply chain.”

Travelife is a three-stage certification programme for tour operators and travel agents:

1. Travelife Engaged
2. Travelife Partner 
3. Travelife Certified.

The Travelife Certified award is a recognition of our excellence towards social and environmental sustainability. We comply to more than 160 criteria related to sustainability management, office operations, working with suppliers and customer communication. Travelife as a certification body is formally Accredited by the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC), the highest global body for sustainability in tourism, supported by the United Nations.

https://travelife.info/index_new.php?menu=certifiedcompanies&lang=en

Nutty’s Adventures has been a Travelife Partner since March 2015 and we achieved full Travelife Certification in 2018 which was renewed in 2020.

Sustaining Our World and Our Cultures

Vision

Our purpose is for tourism to have a positive impact on our environment and local cultures.

Principles

Tourism all too often has had a negative effect on local environments and cultures. At Nutty’s Adventures we believe that it does not have to be like this, that in fact tourism can be a force for good.

Action

By actively engaging with local communities, seeking their advice and suggestions they are empowered as “givers” rather than merely “receivers”. When they understand that people are travelling thousands of kilometres around the world to experience their culture and way of life and to explore the environment in which they live, they come to fully appreciate the value of what they possess.

The communities come to see that the old customs and beliefs need to kept, that traditional dress should be worn and traditional dances performed on occasions, not for the benefit of tourists but for the benefit of the community itself because of their integral value.

Because Western tourists require a certain minimum standards of hygiene and safety we give advice to the villagers on how to improve these areas throughout the village. This not only gives the guests what they require but improves the living conditions for the whole community.

So the benefit that the villagers receive from their tourist guests helps support the community and preserve its way of life. It creates job opportunities which offer alternatives to such illegal activities as mineral exploration, deforestation and hunting wildlife, which in turn helps conserve their environment. Tourism as a force for good.

How to achieve long-term sustainability in our tour programmes and in doing so bring benefit to all parties involved?

Nutty’s Adventures is totally committed to the concept of Community-Based Tourism; tourism that will bring benefit to all parties involved. This means working closely with small rural communities, often in quite remote parts of the country.  By their nature, these communities and the environment in which they are located are fragile. Therefore if benefits are to be derived by the communities, the company and our customers in the long term, serious concrete steps must be taken to safeguard the communities and their natural environments; steps to protect them from physical and cultural degradation. It is therefore a prerequisite of CBT that it be sustainable. 

• Low impact – the numbers of visitors to each community are kept small by rotating arrivals among  different communities.
• Each party of arrival is kept small (6-8 persons)
• All clients are briefed in advance on how to behave in a culturally sensitive way during their stay in the village
• Community enterprises that strengthen the cohesion of the community are supported
• Clients are encouraged to support the local economy
• Wherever possible we try to create additional employment in the community to help keep families together and provide alternatives to illegal or detrimental activities.
• We promote local culture and traditions to help keep them alive for future generations.

• Hand in hand with instilling pride in their traditional culture heritage, we endeavor to instill pride among community members in their natural heritage as well, as the two are often intimately entwined. With pride in these aspects of their life that visitors have come half away round the world to experience, will come the desire to preserve them.
• The additional employment and economic stimulus that visitors will bring may reduce harmful activities such as illegal logging and poaching and so aid in the aim of environmental protection.
• All food is purchased locally, to boost the local economy and reduce any impact on the environment.
• All local transport employed is  low impact village transport
• Trekking, kayaking, rafting and cycling are major activities in many of our programmes
• A commitment to protecting and sustaining local cultures and environments will amount to nothing if we do not also do what we can to protect the global environment upon which all else depends.
• All office practices are geared to reducing consumption and waste (water, electricity, paper, consumer and household items). This makes good economic as well as environmental sense.
• All staff live by this code of limiting  consumption and waste in their everyday lives, not just in the office
• All our tours are structured in a way to reduce their environmental impact and all associated transport also, with a heavy reliance on public surface transport rather than flights or private transport.

• Keep formal records of our conformity with our sustainably policy and goals.
• Continue research into sources of paper from sustainably managed forests
• Continue research into sustainably produced office supplies
• Fully establish our support a reforestation scheme to offset CO2 emissions resulting from our electricity consumption and business travel
• Implement self-evaluation of their sustainability achievements by partner agencies
• Implement self-evaluation of their sustainability achievements by accommodation suppliers 
• Implement self-evaluation by excursion suppliers
• Summarise the sustainability status of accommodations, excursions and activities in each area for sales and marketing purposes
• From the Destination Information folders create trip notes to explain the nature, culture and heritage of each destination
• Create specific destination do’s and don’ts for the Destination information folders 

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