Making Travel a Positive Experience

Here at Jacada Travel, we talk about responsible tourism a lot – but what are we actually doing to make travel more sustainable?

In May 2017, Jacada Travel committed to offsetting 100% of carbon emissions from all future trips by investing in community-based and environmental projects in Brazil, Tanzania and Cambodia. We even offset international flights, whether they are booked with us or independently.

In Brazil and Tanzania, we support deforestation projects. The Cambodian project is a zero-energy water filter production and dissemination business. These projects all work towards reducing carbon emissions, thus helping to balance out the footprint of our travels.

We are proud to say that we’re the only company of our size that has implemented this scheme.

Giving back has long been at the heart of how Jacada operates. When we launched our Africa tours back in 2011, we decided it was crucial to spend some of our profits in a positive way. So, we partnered with Uthando, a community charity based in Cape Town, with whom we have worked ever since.

Now we support one community charity and one conservation project in each of the regions we work, donating a set amount of our profits to each from every trip we book.

Animal interactions (for example, walking with cheetahs and lion cub petting) are grey areas in travel. We decided to take a stronger stance to help inform our travellers – as such, we actively discourage people from visiting any establishment that could be detrimental to wildlife.

Some sanctuaries are dedicated to rescuing orphaned wildlife and reintroducing them back into the wild. Tourist visits and donations help to fund these projects and ultimately have a positive impact on conservation.

However, many animal interaction institutions have no such noble intentions. At petting zoos in Africa, for example, lion cubs are often bred specifically for canned hunting (where animals are kept in fenced areas for ease of trophy hunting). These are the kind of establishments with which we do not work.

Human diseases can be deadly to primates such as gorillas. We realised one way in which we could help protect these endangered animals would be to encourage our travellers to wear surgical face masks when they visit the gorillas. This is enforced by the Democratic Republic of Congo and by Tanzania when visiting the chimpanzees, but not in Uganda or Rwanda.

We asked our suppliers in these two countries to make sure our travellers are provided with masks and we inform our travellers about the issue, and why wearing a mask is so important. In May, we won an award for this campaign.

For more on this subject, read Sue Watt’s feature about gorilla trekking on page 32.

We hand-pick our local guides, safari lodges and hotels to ensure they share the ethics that we have at the core of our business. We also communicate our thoughts on certain matters (e.g. mask-wearing around gorillas and animal interactions) to make sure our policies are followed through.

We have recently committed to sponsoring two big community beach clean-ups a year in Cape Town, the location of one of our offices and one of our most popular destinations for travellers.

All our offices practice recycling and avoid printing where possible. We ask our partners to avoid bringing us brochures if they have the material online or on a USB. Our London office is in the process of switching to a sustainable energy provider and our Hong Kong office has three renewable energy certificates.

If you have any questions about how we make travel a more positive experience, please email your travel designer or enquiries@jacadatravel.com, and check out our blog – jacadatravel.com/the-explorer – for more about travelling sustainably.