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Community
We involve local people in all aspects of our operations. All our Middle East tours are led by highly-qualified local leaders who help you to get 'under the skin' of the country and see it through the eyes of a local. They help ensure that you enjoy interaction with different cultural groups in a spirit of respect, understanding and mutual benefit. All of our tour leaders are trained in accordance with responsible travel policies and will brief our groups about this issue at the start of the tour.
Egypt, Turkey, Syria and Jordan are traditional countries with strong religious sentiment and we ensure that our travellers are provided in advance with all the information they need relating to responsible tourism in order to prepare for their trip. This information covers aspects such as appropriate dress and behaviour, tipping customs as well as more general matters such as our littering and no smoking tour policies. We use public or locally-owned traditional transport for much of the tour (including camels, donkeys and trains) which helps to reduce the carbon emissions from your journey. Our Nile boat is locally owned and much smaller than most others on the river; this means it creates much less water disturbance and causes less erosion to the farming land along the banks.
We eat in family-run restaurants and buy our supplies from local operators. We stay in smaller locally owned and operated hotels and avoid the large multi-national chains which grossly over-consume local resources such as water and electricity. All this ensures that the economic benefits derived from your holiday remains with the communities that you visit and opens up training and employment opportunities. We have long term relationships with some of the best local Egyptologists whose services are included at every ancient site on all Egypt trips. This provides long term employment (even during lulls in tourism) and fair wages. We also have a long-standing relationship with Omar and his family of Nubian sailors; they operate all our felucca sailing trips around Aswan. Plus by working directly with the 'donkey men' and carriage drivers our horse drawn carriage ride to Karnak and donkey ride to the Valley of the Kings involve no 'middle men' ensuring all revenue goes directly to the locals (who in both cases live in smaller villages outside Luxor).
Environment
Our small group size of maximum 16 passengers (sometimes less) ensures we minimise our impact and maximise respectful interaction. Travelling in small groups ensures we make significantly less impact on the natural environment, taking a 'leave no trace' approach. In Egypt we have run ‘Clean up the Nile’ trips to help clean the Nile riverbanks between Aswan and Luxor where a predominance of tourist feluccas camp each night leave a fair amount of rubbish behind due to the lack of waste disposal outlets.
In Jordan we belong to the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature, an independent voluntary organisation devoted to the conservation of Jordan’s natural resources. The RSCN is active in running Wadi Rum so we support them on the ground by including this in our programme.
We invite every traveller who books a holiday via us to send in a review. Because we don't run the holidays they're completely independent and unedited... remember to read between the lines though, as two people on the same holiday can have different views!
