Sign up to 'Travel With A Conscience'

Native Escapes, specialist tour operator to Southern Africa, has launched a campaign calling for ethical tourism on the popular social networking site Facebook. The campaign, titled ‘Travel with a Conscience’ calls for holiday makers to consider the effect of their visit on the local environment and community, and invites would-be ethical tourists to sign up and become a friend of Native Escapes.

Native Escapes specialises in small group and tailor made safari trips to South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zambia, with itineraries that include a range of experiences unique to the local environment such as cheetah tracking activities, hot air ballooning over the desert, and seeing wildlife from a canoe. What makes them really different, however, is that guests can leave knowing that their visit has genuinely helped in terms of conservation or sustainability.

Each group trip dossier on Nativeescapes.com includes a paragraph on how the trip benefits local communities. Managing Director Sharon Holmes comments:

“We are taking a different approach by emphasising the ethical element of our trips: whilst our clients want to have fun and a range of experiences, they can leave knowing that their visit has genuinely helped in terms of conservation or sustainability. We have actively sought out activities for visitors that benefit the local environment or community, accommodation that might be involved in a local sustainable project, and community projects which guests can visit and donate to directly”.

Examples of activities include a cheetah tracking experience in Namibia which benefits a local foundation dedicated to the rehabilitation of big cats back into the wild, and an opportunity to swim with wild dolphins in Mozambique run by a dolphin research station.

Accommodation used in the itineraries focuses on small lodges and B&Bs, and many of these invest a percentage of their revenue into local community or environmental projects. Examples include a small lodge in Namibia which uses funds to protect the endangered Lapped-Faced Vultures, and another in South Africa which assists in the training of neighbouring communities to supply arts, crafts and produce to the lodge’s curio shops and kitchens, giving them an opportunity to earn significant income.

In addition, Native Escapes has set up links with local villages or projects so that visitors can take items to donate: local Zulu village schools in South Africa are very short of resources, and items such as basic English books, stationery, deflated footballs or rugby balls or toys are very gratefully received. In Namibia, similar items can be donated to a project which provides basic numeracy and literacy teaching programme to 50 orphans.

For more information, visit Nativeescapes.com. To join the ‘Travel with a Conscience’ Campaign, sign up at Facebook.com and type ‘Travel with a Conscience’ into the search box.