Brazil

We believe in making a difference, both to lives of its clients through an inspirational experience of Brazil but also to the destination. We do this by:

Basing our holidays in a designated sustainable tourism area, where tourism is accommodated using the existing infrastructure (no high rise hotels or fast food chains) and is managed to ensure it has minimal environmental and social impact.

Taking part in ‘Make Favela Art’, a fantastic social project that aims to paint all 15,000 houses in the Prazeres favela (shantytown) in bright colours to create Rio’s newest landmark, improving quality of life for the residents but also boosting the perception of the favelas to the rest of Rio. On this trip, not only will you get the chance to actively participate in the painting work, but a donation is made by us to cover the cost of purchasing the necessary brushes and paint.

Providing 25% of the running costs of a local social project that offers out of school educational and recreational activities for children and teenagers in a local Rio favela. During the holiday, we will take you to visit the social project, an opportunity to see where some of the money from your holiday is going, to interact with the children in the project and see the positive impact the project is having in their lives.

Carefully choosing suppliers who work in a socially responsible way: for instance, the dance school in which you will be taking lessons also runs free dance classes for young people from local disadvantaged communities, and the Capoeira school that we use is run as a social enterprise, using the revenue from customers like us to fund Capoeira education for young people who cannot afford to pay for the lessons.

Choosing and recommending local service providers to ensure the money we use goes back to the local community. We use a bed and breakfast network for our accommodation which not only provides a valuable source of income to the local host families but is also run as a social enterprise, providing training in the principles of sustainable tourism to local ancillary service providers (waiters, bar, restaurant and shop owners, taxi and cable car drivers). We also use a local transport cooperative to provide our transport and recommend excellent local bars and restaurants and hiking guides.

Giving our clients a full briefing on the economic and social realities of the country in which they are staying, plus advising on appropriate behaviour, and providing a complimentary Portuguese lesson to enhance communication with local people.

Offsetting carbon emissions: we work with Climate Care to offset the Carbon emissions caused by our business and all the flights we take. We add the price of the carbon offsetting for our clients’ flights to the invoice as an optional additional charge.