Steppes Travel Impact Report 2023

Impact Report FUTUREPROOFING TRAVEL 2023

We believe in Good Travel.

In travel that helps protect and conserve; that creates opportunity; that supports and celebrates diversity in culture, in flora and in fauna.

That gives more than takes; that brings people forward and makes memories for all; that builds community and fellowship; that’s an investment in emotional wealth.

This is our kind of travel.

This is the travel we fight for.

Contents.

01 Taking Positive Steps to Safeguard Future Travel 02 Steppes Fund for Change 03 Steppes Fund for Female Guides 04 Female Guides in India: Guardians of Our Forests 05 Seawilding 06 The Long Table 07 Brigg Afforesation Project 08 Measuring Our Impact 09 Progress Report 10 Our Goals Towards Making a Positive Impact in 2024 11 Conclusion – A Life Well Travelled 3

Taking Positive Steps to Safeguard Future Travel.

The claim that travel is a force for good has been widely adopted by the tourism industry in 2023, but does the claim stand up to scrutiny? Not always, is the honest answer but, as ever, the devil’s in the detail. This report attempts to give the detail behind our efforts to create a business that not only fulfils our clients’ desire for outstanding travel experiences, but also delivers positive outcomes to local communities and biodiversity around the world.

The feedback we receive from our clients vindicates our belief that having a positive impact when you travel does not require compromise. On the contrary, it’s an enhancement to the enjoyment of our clients’ trips as, after all, there’s nothing better than travel that’s as positive to your wellbeing as it is to the wellbeing of your hosts and their local environment. We’re very grateful to our clients who put their faith in us to deliver such memorable travel experiences in 2023. Without them, our philanthropic arm, Steppes Fund for Change, would not have been able to support the community and conservation initiatives outlined in this report. They’re part of our story and form the engine for our endeavours. We’d also like to thank our partners all over the world who enable us to curate such regenerative holidays. It is only by creating such a win-win dynamic that the travel industry can continue to thrive.

We will continue to measure our impact as a business and be transparent with the results as we believe it is crucial for the travel industry to substantiate its claims that travel is a force for good. It is only through such substantiation that we’ll create a sustainable future in which all of us with a love of travel can continue to explore the world.

Jarrod Kyte PRODUCT & SUSTAINABILITY DIRECTOR STEPPES TRAVEL

Steppes Fund for Change.

A minimum of 1% of our annual turnover is donated to projects supporting conservation, community development and carbon sequestration.

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In the last 12 months, by travelling with Steppes, our clients have helped us generate £138,431 which has been donated to environmental and community initiatives, both locally and across the planet.

The next few pages report on the work that’s been done by the organisations we’ve supported in 2023.

Albeit on a small scale, we’re confident that positive outcomes have been created by the Steppes Fund for Change which, would not exist without the ongoing support of our clients.

Total donations for 2022-2023:

Carbon offset for flights £64,572

Who we’ve supported in the last 12 months under the auspices of Steppes Fund for Change:

Brigg Afforestation Project £12,000

The Long Table £18,808

Seawilding £18,305

Steppes Fund for Female Guides £14,320

Galapagos Conservation Trust £3,835

Morocco Education For All Earthquake Appeal £5,000

Steppes Fund for Change £74,268 Toilet Twinning £1,000

African Parks £1,000

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Steppes Fund for Female Guides.

Steppes Fund for Female Guides £14,320 Economic growth and social development are more likely to flourish where women and girls are empowered to fully participate in paid work. In June 2023 we launched the Steppes Fund for Female Guides, offering bursaries to women looking to gain formal training and education in pursuit of a career in tourism. When given the opportunity, women are effective agents of change in combating the climate crisis at a household, community, national and international level.

These bursaries are available to women of any age in any country in which we currently operate. The travel labour market accounts for 1 in 4 jobs in the world and so we hope our bursary will enable women to gain equal access to the knowledge and skills required to pursue a fulfilling and prosperous career.

We’re also mindful of the difference a good guide can make to the enjoyment of your holiday; and we know that in countries where women are already fulfilling that role, they’re among some of our clients favourite travelling companions.

Esther Phiri Esther Phiri started her guiding career in Zambia in the late summer of 2023 with African Bush Camps, having successfully applied for financial support through the Steppes Fund for Female Guides. During the last few months, she’s been gaining hands-on experience by joining experienced guides in the field, alongside getting valuable driving time transferring clients to and from Victoria Falls. At the end of 2023 Esther is set to sit her guiding exams before commencing the next stage of her practical training.

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Our second apprentice starts in Botswana any day now, and we look forward to sharing her progress with you. We’re currently in discussions with female candidates in Peru, Colombia, Kenya, Madagascar, Zimbabwe and Mongolia, to whom we hope to be confirming bursaries soon.

A note to all our partners: If you know of somebody who deserves funding for guide training, then we want to hear from you. Perhaps you’re keen to offer an apprenticeship to a local woman but need some help to give them the training and support they need. We’d love to spread the net wider. Talk to us. We’ll help where we can.

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Female Guides in India: “Guardians of Our Forests.“ In October 2023, we partnered with Tiger Trust to give training to female guides working in national parks across Central India. The first women to occupy official guiding roles were in Kanha approximately ten years ago, but sadly there’s still a cultural taboo which prevents many women from applying for this sort of work. For those women who have taken on the mantel, training has, at best, been sporadic and sadly many will face prejudice in their day to day working lives.

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So, in conjunction with our partner in India we provided training to 53 female guides currently working in Bandhavgarh, Pench, Kanha and Satpura, enhancing their knowledge, confidence and guiding techniques to provide a solid footing to their professional aspirations. Steppes’ partner in India, Amit Sankhala was instrumental in organising the training:

It is vital for women from the villages neighbouring our parks to be given equal opportunities to benefit from tourism. If their livelihoods depend on wildlife, then they are the best guardians of our forest.

- AMIT SANKHALA

Bandhavgarh training curriculum: Understanding sustainable tourism and a guide’s responsibility in conservation.

Role of a wildlife guide and what attributes are required to make a good guide.

Understanding guests: Culture, gender and sensitivity to special needs.

Guiding techniques: Being in control of the safari, handling animal sightings, visual navigation and effective use of binoculars and field guides.

Responsible waste management in nature tourism.

Women in the Field: A discussion on solutions to issues and challenges facing women in guiding.

A brief history of Bandhavgarh.

Mammals, birds, reptiles and flora of Bandhavgarh.

Tigers of Bandhavgarh.

Elephants in Bandhavgarh and the translocation of gaur and barasingha.

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Seawilding.

Seawilding £18,305 Allow us to introduce you to the UK’s first community-led native oyster and seagrass restoration project, delivered by an inspiring organisation where a collective effort is put into restoring the loss of biodiversity, sequestering carbon and creating green jobs.

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Making the world our oyster Known as ‘ecosystem engineers’, native oysters filter and clean water as well as sequester carbon, contributing substantially to inshore biodiversity.

Seawilding are on a mission to grow up to 1 million juvenile native oysters in Loch Craignish, Argyll, to restore the natural beds. After extensive baseline surveys around the loch, dedicated community volunteers broadcast these juvenile native oysters, into the shallows of the loch – all by hand.

People should care because it is about the future. We wanna eat, we wanna breathe, we wanna live in the future, then we have to look after the future.

- DANNY RENTON SEAWILDING FOUNDING DIRECTOR

Another essential keystone species which sequesters carbon and supports biodiversity is seagrass. It provides home, sanctuary and a spawning ground for marine life. The surveys conducted in Loch Craignish reveal that without the seagrass, half of the marine species would be lost. And globally, 92% of seagrass has disappeared.

Seawilding is seeking to change this through dynamic restoration projects at scale. This work not only cleans, restores and revives biodiversity in the fight against climate change, but brings together the coastal community, strengthening a connection to the water and to each other.

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2023 and the year ahead The past year has been a fruitful one for Seawilding, with 350,000 native oysters restored so far. In spring 2023, their floating nursery tripled in size and their surveys reveal that there’s a third more biodiversity in their native oyster beds compared to their control sites, with oyster numbers multiplying rapidly - known as an oyster ‘spat’.

2023 brought challenges as well as successes, such as a rise in sea temperature resulting in some damage to the native oyster nursery – a timely reminder of the importance of marine habitat restoration.

Looking ahead, Seawilding have some exciting projects lined up: Investing into a ‘spatting pond’ to increase local production.

The opening of a new oyster nursey in Loch Broom, Wester Ross.

The trialling of the UK’s first seagrass rhizome restoration.

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The Long Table.

We feel privileged to have The Long Table right on our doorstep, just down the road in Stroud. The people there exude passion and determination in the pursuit of their goal to give everyone in our local community access to great food and people to eat it with.

Our food system at the moment is costly to our health, our society and the environment. With one third of food grown currently being thrown away, founders Tom Herbet and Will Mansell have decided to take on these issues and create what we believe to be something extraordinary.

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The Long Table £18,808

The Long Table seeks to provide delicious answers to these issues through not only food resilience, where the distance from farm to fork is decreased, but community resilience, where the issue of food equality is addressed.

The Long Table have created food hubs to make this possible, providing meals on a pay-as-you-can basis and a place where people can eat together, sharing conversation as well as food. The Long Table has also created a network of ‘Freezers of Love’ to allow access to food in places further away.

The Teenage Kitchen In 2023, Steppes Fund for Change supported the Teenage Kitchen, an extension to the Long Table providing a space for hands-on education.

Led by talented young chef Owen Taylor-Leach, the course ran over seven weeks and was attended by 15- and 16year-olds from all walks of life in the Stroud area.

The curriculum covered basic kitchen skills such as how to use a knife, how to bake and how to fry, and introduced the young apprentices to key flavours such as sweet, salt, bitter, sour and umami.

Fundamentally, connection happens around the table and a lot of people lack connection.

- WILL NORTH GM THE LONG TABLE

Food for thought – 2023 and the year ahead The future is looking bright for the Long Table as they expand their mission into Cirencester. Looking back at the past year shows how impactful they have been: 3.32 tonnes of food was repurposed back into meals that would have otherwise gone to waste.

26,034 people ate a pay-as-you-go meal at the table.

1,249 meals were paid forward by customers for someone else to redeem.

1,694 people claimed a meal.

17,704 hours of paid employments were generated.

2,040 meals were taken from freezers of love in 5 communities.

14 inner-city children joined a culinary adventure.

4 community cafes received funding.

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Brigg Afforestation Project.

Brigg Afforestation Project £12,000

Back in 2018, the Steppes Travel team planted a mixture of oak, Scotch pine, hawthorn, hazel and crab apple alongside a group of professional tree planters employed by the Woodland Trust in Brigg, just outside of Scunthorpe.

Landowner Ben Jackson has kept us updated on the Steppes afforestation project. Despite drought and flooding, the trees have had an excellent survival rate, with some saplings reaching up to 12ft in height. It’s heartening to hear that the land Steppes Fund For Change paid to have set aside for afforestation is bursting with wildlife as the 33,000 trees continue to grow and bloom.

The undergrowth has created habitat for wildlife with signs of field mice, hares and deer (which can sometimes be a problem when they nibble on the young trees!).

There have also been sightings of numerous birds including English partridge, snipe, buzzards, sparrowhawks and songbirds. A good sign, as Ben states: “I believe that we’re on course to achieve the aim which was to improve air quality and the ecosystem.”

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Measuring Our Impact.

Offsetting – one element of our coordinated response to the climate crisis Our policy on offsetting remains as follows: We offset our clients’ international and domestic flights, even if the flights are not booked by Steppes Travel.

We offset these flights based on travel in economy class.

We encourage our clients to make up the difference in offset, should they choose to travel in a higher cabin class.

We offset our own staff travel flights.

We offset our office carbon footprint.

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We acknowledge that offsetting is not a panacea for the issue of carbon.

However, in conjunction with a policy of measurement, reduction and adaptation, it’s an important part of the solution.

We offset the CO² generated by our clients' flights, based on economy class travel, in the period September 1st 2022 – August 30th 2023 (our financial year), at a cost of £63,619 paid to World Land Trust.

In October 2023, we successfully integrated a calculator into our database which enables us to measure the carbon emissions of our client's flights using an API with Google. We are using this enhancement to display to our clients the difference between an economy class offset and a premium class offset, should they choose to travel in a premium class.

We continue to work with World Land Trust with whom our offsets are allocated to a portfolio of self-certified REDD+ projects (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) in countries such as Vietnam, Ecuador, Guatemala and Mexico.

While afforestation has an important role to play in providing nature-based carbon extraction, the protection and restoration of existing forests is paramount. According to World Land Trust, between 10-20% of global GHG emissions are caused by the destruction of existing forest.

Measuring our HQ’s footprint With the help of ecollective, a carbon consultancy, we measured the footprint of our headquarters in Cirencester for the calendar year of 2023 as 63.5 tCO².

This figure is broken down as follows: Office energy consumption, water usage and waste - 2.6 tCO².

Working from home - 4 tCO².

Business travel – 40.8 tCO².

Staff commuting - 15.1 tCO².

Website - 1 tCO².

This works out as 50kgs of CO² per client travelling with Steppes in 2023.

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This is a significant increase on 2022 due, in the main, to the improved methodology we’ve used to accurately record domestic business travel and an increase in the level of overseas travel taken by our team as part of our research and development. With ecollective’s help we’ve attempted to calculate carbon emissions associated with our team working from home for approximately 40% of the week and emissions associated with our team’s commute for the days they work from our office.

In 2023, we introduced sustainable procurement guidelines for all stationery, foods, cleaning items and other amenities purchased for use in the office. Also, we signed up to the UK government's Bike 2 Work Scheme.

An offset payment of £952 has been made to World Land Trust to offset the operational carbon footprint of our office in 2023. Our aim is to reduce this carbon footprint by 7% year on year.

B Corp In the first half of 2022, following a rigorous application process, Steppes Travel became a certified B Corp company.

We went through this process to validate our commitment to sustainability through people, planet and profit, using a respected third party.

To qualify, independent assessors looked at the impact of our business in respect to ‘governance, workers, environment, community and customers.’

Going forward we will be held accountable through being required to submit an annual impact statement (such as this) and every three years being required to recertify.

Recertification is certainly not something that we take for granted and we will continue to work hard to take advice, to learn from others and to make improvements wherever we can. It’s not a journey that we’ll be undertaking alone – that is the joy of B Corp, it’s about community and collaboration.

Our B Impact Assessment score was 89.8 - the minimum threshold for qualification is 80.

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Paying a fair price for nature In 2022, we launched our Pay a Fair Price for Nature campaign, using the inadequate Galapagos National Park Fee as an example of how the world’s natural assets are undervalued.

Tourism can play a key role in affording the world’s natural assets a tangible commercial value and, in doing so, help protect them. But, for this to really work, governments and private enterprises need to work together to ensure tourism pays the true value for the services that nature provides. Sadly, this is not always the case and the Galapagos National Park fee epitomises this issue.

From holidays departing to Galapagos in the financial year of 2022/23, our clients helped us generate £3,835 for Galapagos Conservation Trust (GCT) to supplement the inadequate $100 National Park Fee. In the calendar year 2023, we have organised two back-to-back charters in the Galapagos to enable GCT supporters to see firsthand some of the conservation and community projects the organisation has implemented. Set to depart in June/July2024, £15,000 per voyage will be donated by Steppes Travel with a further £5,000 per voyage being contributed by our partner, Royal Galapagos. With a total of 30 berths, only one berth remains available.

Galapagos Conservation Trust £3,835

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Progress Report.

Our performance against the goals we set towards making a positive impact in 2023: 1.

The financial support we give to carbon, conservation and community-based initiatives will be at least 1% of our total revenue.

In our last two financial years we have achieved this goal and will continue to use this metric as a means of extending our positive impact on conservation, community and carbon sequestration across the world.

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At least 20 of our most popular destinations will have a carbon emissions baseline figure that reflects all components of the holiday (flights, accommodation, transport, excursions etc.)

Due to the tailormade nature of our business, obtaining an accurate carbon measurement of our operations on the ground is a challenge. The lack of accurate carbon data available for many of the hotels we book, also calls into question the efficacy of this exercise. These concerns have led to this goal being superseded by other priorities, but nonetheless we will roll this goal over to 2024.

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We will measure the number of bookings where our clients have offset the difference between economy and premium cabin seats on their flights and look for a means of incentivising this action.

In October 2023, we successfully integrated a calculator into our database to allow us to measure the carbon emissions of the flights we book on our client's behalf. This tool allows us to itemise the difference between an economy offset and a premium class offset. We now display this information on quotes and confirmation documents, facilitating our clients to pay the upgraded difference, on the basis that Steppes Travel already covers the cost of the economy class offset. In 2024, we will look to introduce incentivisation to encourage our clients to opt-in to this offsetting scheme.

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4.

50% of the hotels/lodges we book in 2023 in our top selling destinations will be from our short-list of positive impact properties.

By the end of 2023 we should have a working list of positive impact properties for 14 of our top selling destinations, against which we can track bookings in 2024. In addition we will continue to compile lists of positive impact properties for the remaining six countries in our list of top 20 selling destinations. We have continued to engage with Weeva, a sustainability management platform helping hotels track, measure, and report on their sustainable operations, to help validate our choice of positive impact hotels.

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50% of the Holiday Ideas on our website will articulate how the holiday contributes to at least three UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Currently only 16% of our Holiday Ideas refer to at least three UNSDGs. Lack of progress is mainly down to a lack of resources but we will continue to work towards this goal in 2024.

Our Goals Towards Making a Positive Impact in 2024.

Philanthropy - in support of conservation, community and carbon sequestration: 1. Continue to give a minimum of 1% of our revenue to causes supporting conservation, community and carbon sequestration.

2. To extend the reach of our Steppes Fund for Female Guides to cover Latin America and Asia.

Impact on the ground – decarbonisation and enhancing our impact on people and planet: 3. Complete the list of positive impact properties for the remaining four destinations on our top 20 list and begin tracking our progress against a target of 50% of bed-nights booked, for these key destinations.

4. 50% of the Holiday Ideas on our website will articulate how the holiday contributes to at least three UN Sustainable Development Goals (currently 16% of our Holiday Ideas have this information).

5. Establish a carbon emissions baseline figure for our ten most popular destinations, based on 2023 departures (in collaboration with ecollective).

The figure will reflect all components of the holiday (flights, accommodation, transport, excursions etc.) and will be used to estimate the total Scope 3 carbon footprint of our business, with targets and actions then implemented to reduce this figure for the benefit of all our stakeholders.

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Team – enhanced engagement: 6. At least 5 more members of the Steppes’ team to have completed the Global Sustainable Tourism Council’s Sustainable Tourism course.

7. To encourage a greater take up by our team of the opportunity to do volunteer work as part of their normal working hours (at least 30% across the year).

Value chain – closer collaboration on creating travel experiences that enhance the benefit of our holidays to clients, hosts and planet: 8. Partners in our twenty most popular destinations to have completed a Positive Impact Travel questionnaire to help identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

HQ – walking the walk at home: 9. A reduction of our HQ carbon footprint of 7% year on year.

10. To set targets for the reduction of our carbon footprint in relation to waste, our staffs’ commute to work and our business travel.

Conclusion – A Life Well Travelled.

We’ll continue to ask ourselves difficult questions, knowing that we’re nowhere near having all the answers. We’ll continue to question how we travel and ask ourselves where we need to adapt. We’ll continue to take stock of the consequences that travel may have and ask ourselves if we could perhaps create more positive outcomes; and while we’ll always celebrate tourism that unequivocally creates a net positive outcome, we’ll never be shy of acknowledging where tourism is doing more harm than good.

We hope our clients and partners will join us on our journey to substantiate the positive influence of travel in the world, and in doing so, join us in living a life well-travelled.

TRAVEL AS A FORCE FOR GOOD