Cultural holiday in Rio de Janeiro

We believe in making a difference, both to lives of our clients through an inspirational experience of Brazil but also to the destination. We do in the following ways.

Volunteering is one of the most important components of our bespoke holiday. Volun-tourism is a fantastic opportunity for the traveller and a much needed resource for the destination country. However, the volunteering experience can vary greatly in how much difference it really makes, and we are very aware of this. We have a commitment to making sure that the time you spend volunteering is as useful and productive, with as much positive impact, as possible.

To this end, we work closely with the social projects we are in partnership to build unique programmes for longer term volunteers and to match the right clients with the right projects to ensure skills are used effectively; we always conduct a post-placement review to look at what the placement has achieved, to update the status and requirements of the project and to liaise with project managers and volunteers to learn from each placement so that our volunteering experience is always improving.

The other activities which we offer centre around learning the language, dance, music and culture of the destination country, which all work fantastically to promote cross-cultural understanding and, importantly, respect.

We base 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.

We provide 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.

We choose and recommend local service providers to ensure the money we use goes back to the local community. We use a locally run accommodation which recycles and reuses wherever possible, uses energy efficient light bulbs and has a towels-washed-on-request policy. We also use a local transport cooperative to provide our transport and recommend excellent local bars and restaurants and hiking guides.

We give our clients a full briefing on the economic and social realities of the country in which they are staying, plus advising on appropriate behaviour. 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.