Luang Prabang & Central Laos holiday
This trip can be tailor made to create a unique holiday for your individual requirements by travel experts with intimate knowledge of the destination. Sites and accommodations can be arranged to suit you and your budget. This is a comfortable trip that will suit those who enjoy immersing themselves in new cultures and environments before relaxing in comfort in characterful local accommodation!
How this holiday makes a difference
Environment
All transport used is sourced locally to ensure that the wealth is spread as much as possible and of course with a small groups we are able to use small vehicles therefore reducing our carbon footprint and damage to roads. Drinking water is provided with transport and we encourage the use of large containers to refill clients own water bottles to reduce waste.
Most of our package tours are based on a maximum of 10 persons per tour which significantly minimizes our impact, especially on the more remote and rural areas that we visit. With these small groups we are able to use minivans and local tuk tuks - as opposed to large coaches, to keep our carbon footprint as low as possible and of course minimise damage to roads and tracks.
Our general impact on local way-of-life when visiting remote villages is also greatly reduced with a small group. It also means our policy of using locally run hotels and guesthouses as opposed to the big “chain” hotels is easy to maintain. We are proud to say that we are keeping to this policy as the business expands - in direct comparison with some of the big international foreign owned operators who sometimes come to Laos with “small” groups as big as 20 and coach tours with 50+ clients and all the potential problems that can bring.
We take great care in attention to detail all the way down through the whole organization to the ground with our clients. From minimizing the use of paper in the office, to actively helping and encouraging our clients to reduce their impact by simple but crucial methods such as reducing and recycling waste as much as possible. Our tour packages include drinking water, which is provided using large containers to refill clients own water bottles, to reduce the use of plastic bottles. We take great care to remove all our waste from remote areas, much of which can be donated to a village to be recycled.
Community
As a Tour Operator promoting the relatively unexplored central region, we feel we have extra responsibility to keep our impact as small as possible whilst doing what we can to ensure tourism benefits the people that need it most. For this particular trip our maximum group size is 6, and most groups are less than 6, to minimise the impact on the rural areas. This reflects the “remoteness” and lack of infrastructure of some parts of the itinerary.
A national guide who has been further trained by us will lead the tour to enhance guests experience and to ensure responsible travel at all times. There will be a briefing and handout given to guests prior to the start of the tour with specific details about cultural do’s and don’ts and other important information to ensure that we travel in harmony with our surroundings.
In Vientiane we also encourage our guests to eat at the fantastic “Makphet” restaurant. Not only is the food great but as part of the non-profit “Friends” organisation all staff are former street children who have been given an opportunity to gain an education, receive training and eventually find jobs in the hospitality industry. Our city tour in Vientiane also now includes as standard a visit to COPE, another charity doing some great work in Laos.
In Luang Prabang we support Big Brother Mouse, another charity doing working in Laos. They produce and distribute educational books for the children of remote villages, the only organisation to do so. We encourage our guests to visit in their free time there, and we are also actively involved in the distribution process when we purchase some books and distribute them ourselves when we visit villages.
All activities on the itinerary, as well as the optional activities, have been developed by the provincial tourism departments. They are community based and have been developed in co-operation with local stakeholders with help from foreign NGO’s, ensuring that the proceeds go back into the local communities and not to tour operators. All local guides are employed from local ethnic communities. For the 1day trek we stay at a specially constructed Eco-lodge in a remote village ensuring significant income for a remote community.
In fact, the whole development of these activities has been to protect and sustain the local communities and environment, and the local guides have been specifically trained to pass this awareness on to guests. These activities not only provide a sustainable income for the local guides but also for the villages through a central village fund that we contribute to for every guest that passes through.
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