Our Responsible Tourism Commitment

Our commitment to responsible and sustainable travel is at the heart of everything we do.

We are dedicated to ensuring we adopt a responsible attitude to the areas we travel through. Our key aim is to maximise the positive benefits tourism can deliver whilst minimising the impact of any potentially damaging social, cultural or environmental consequences.

Policy & Guidelines We are committed to trying to reduce, re-use and recycle as much as possible, wherever we are in the world. See how.

Top RT Tips Take advantage of our years of travelling through our range of top responsible travel tips.

Our Projects We believe we should give something back to the people & communities we travel through. Find out more.

Aito Award We are very proud to have been awarded the prestigious AITO Sustainable Tourism Achievement Award.

What do we mean by Responsible Tourism?
For starters, we think that responsible, sustainable, green, or ethical tourism (they all mean pretty much the same thing) should be core to all our tours. Put simply, to us Responsible Tourism is all about trying to travel in a way that benefits the people who live in the places we visit, making sure we try to minimise the impact we have on the environment and landscape.

Dragoman’s commitment to Responsible Travel
We are dedicated to building a sustainable travel business and environmental, social and ethical considerations are key to our decision-making processes. We believe our trips should benefit local people and we endeavour to make local culture and communities an integral part of our trips. Perhaps most importantly, we recognise that we are guests of local communities we travel through - and we strive to make these communities into our partners, so they can benefit directly from our business.

We have a formal responsible tourism policy, a set of guidelines that aim to maximise the positive benefits we bring to the communities our groups travel through, whilst minimising any negative impact on the local environment. We are committed to educating our staff, crew, local guides, agents, suppliers and all who travel with us in the importance of these issues – and to providing practical guidelines to help us achieve our objectives, setting goals for us to all work towards together.

We know we're not perfect and we're always looking for ways to improve - but we are really proud that our efforts have been acknowledged by the Association of Independent Tour Operators, who have recognised our achievements and awarded us their 5 Star Sustainable Tour Operator rating. In 2009 we were also granted AITO’s Sustainable Tourism Achievement Award, in light of our community-based tourism work in the high Peruvian Andes.

Eco-tourism and looking after the environment
We are committed to trying to reduce, re-use and recycle as much as is possible, wherever we are in the world. To see a copy of our environmental policy, click here.

Community-based Tourism
Wherever we are in the world we prefer to use smaller locally owned businesses, ensuring that locally communities gain a direct economic benefit from our business.

For example:

• We use small locally owned hotels, campsites and activity providers wherever possible and aim to do our food shopping in local markets, where much local produce is purchased
• By using the services of local guides and employing local camp masters in Africa, we support the local economy as well as providing our passengers with the benefit of direct interaction with local people
• Use of local mechanics, workshops and parts suppliers mean that our economic returns are far reaching and not just tourism based

We are committed to promoting human rights within our sphere of influence. This means trying to ensure that everybody involved with Dragoman are treated with fairness and respect; this includes our office staff, crew, local guides and suppliers as well as all the other stakeholders impacted by our business.

We are also involved with a variety of community projects in key destinations we visit. Our involvement with these projects is a long-term commitment, allowing us and our passengers to participate directly in delivering real practical benefits to the communities we travel through on the ground. These projects are not tourist initiatives but a way of employing tourism to generate funding and support & facilitate community interaction. Priority is given to projects in areas of particular need.