Bear tracking holiday in Slovakia

Environment
This is a truly unique adventure holiday, where time is spent in an untouched wilderness, far from the usual tourist tracks, in a region only accessible to tourists travelling as part of Bear Watch Slovakia. Our in country agents are the only operators to have permission to take traveller into this area of the High Tatras Mountains, tracking and studying the bears of this isolated region. The work being done is vital to understanding the movements and behaviour of one of Europe’s most awe-inspiring mammals. Protecting this environment, educating the local community and understanding bear behaviour and numbers is the primary focus of this trip.

As well as financial support, €180 per passenger is contributed to the project and is included in the trip price, this itinerary offers valuable human resources to the bear tracking project. Travellers will spend a majority of the trip in the company of the experienced Bear Watch team; tracking the animals and monitoring their behaviour through (for example) print and dung analysis and measurement of tree scratchings. The project also aims to attain a much more accurate understanding of bear corridors and learn crucial patterns regarding drinking and feeding locations. The aim is gathering enough information on the animals to educate the people of the region who traditionally see them either as a dangerous threat or use them as targets for sport hunting. Through better understanding the behaviour of these animals, hopefully they will become regarded as magnificent natural assets.

We know a 3 day visit won’t always make a lasting impact to a project, but we hope your time at the here will demonstrate how little things can make a big difference, and leave you feeling that you have made a small (but valuable) contribution back to the area through which you’ve travelled.

Global warming is a real issue and travel is an inescapable contributor. We have teamed up with the Tourism Industry Carbon Offset Service to give you the opportunity to offset the carbon emissions from your flight. You’ll be asked upon booking if you want to donate to the solar stove and poverty reduction project we are supporting in South Africa – £4 for this trip. As a company we offset the carbon emissions from all staff travel and office energy use in full. Clients who travel with us will also automatically receive a copy of our Responsible Travel leaflet. This contains details and advice on how you can make a positive difference when you travel.

Community
We work in partnership with the following charities. SOS Children is the world’s largest orphan and abandoned children charity, helping some of the world’s most vulnerable children. We also support Friends of Conservation – an international charity committed to working with local people to develop a balance between their needs and the wildlife with which they share the natural habitat and ecosystems. Other charities that we work closely with include the Born Free Foundation, an animal welfare charity working to prevent animal suffering in captivity and to protect them in the wild, the Galapagos Conservation Trust - a UK charity that raises funds and awareness for the conservation of the Galapagos Islands, and The Travel Foundation, a UK charity that has been established to promote responsible travel practises throughout the whole of the travel industry.

We’ve highlighted a few of the ways we offer support to various charitable initiatives, both financially and otherwise, and now you can too. We have a Foundation, which we administer with contributions from you and us. A voluntary donation of £1 per person will be taken when booking a holiday which will be put to good use on one of our carefully selected projects. If you don’t want to make the donation, just tell us when you book. To encourage you to do this and to put our money where our mouth is, we’ll match every single £1 donated and we’ll give this to Just a Drop. This is a global charity founded by members of the international travel industry, aiming to provide clean water and sanitation where it is most badly needed. In the developing world it costs just £1 to supply water to a child for nearly 10 years, so for every single person who travels with us we’ll give Just a Drop £1.