Viator Travel

Aims
Viator Travel operates tourism that fosters principles of responsible tourism (minimising our environmental impact, maximising cultural interaction and ensuring an economic benefit to the community) in all aspects of our business - in all services we provide for individuals and groups.

Viator Travel emphasizes principles of responsible and sustainable travel in each level of our business: “Minimize bad and maximize good impacts to protect the environmental, socio-cultural diversity and achieve positive economic result for community”

Tourism is not just about traveling, meeting people, different cultures, fun…we have to observe tourism as one of the world's largest industries too. Besides positive impacts, modern tourism obtains negative environmental and socio-cultural impacts on: water, natural beauty of the country, beaches and islands, plants, birds and animals, traditional ways of life and cultural heritage. We believe that our principles of responsible travel can sustain destinations and local communities for the future.

Economic responsibility
All our guides are local and we train our staff to be more responsible for the local environment and ecology. We buy local products as the souvenirs for our partners and we encourage our guests to buy local products.

We use local services as much as we can. For restaurants we always choose restaurants with character (mostly family run restaurants with local speciaties). On all our tours we use local produce and provide local-style meals, and we encourage our guests to try local dishes and delicacies.We use a lot of locally owned accommodation and this provides direct income for local house owners.

The local community has direct income from our tours (accommodation, taxes, souvenirs, restaurants, boat or coach transfers). I'm a member of ecological association Kurenat from Mlini 20 207, Zupa Dubrovacka and besides ecological efforts we organize rock concerts, sports events (humanitarian cross), and we published bulletin Kurenat (this bulletin is about ecological, cultural and historical aspects of Zupa Dubrovacka). Using local employees, guides, accommodation providers and transportation services, Viator Travel ensures that financial benefits remain in the local community.

Environmental responsibility
We used recycled paper. We recycle all our waste paper (brochures, etc). Our correspondence and promotion is carried out via the internet and email, minimizing the amount of paper used for our activities.

We support different local ecological associations and our staff was directly involved in afforestation (planting of pine trees in Dubrovnik area after fire disaster in summer 2007.) We are active mostly in places where we live, but we support many Croatian ecological organizations (Zelena Akcija). Besides above mentioned afforestation during autumn 2008 and a couple of seasons before, we directly support and we are involved in the ecological action of cleaning the sea. This underwater cleaning is ecological action which is support by local diving centers and fisherman's associations. The planting trees and underwater cleaning are ecological actions which we have supported for many years; moreover I am one of founders of this ecological association.

We encourage travellers to be more responsible with water waste, and we inform all our travellers before their tour about area, especially travelers on tours when they are in protected areas, sea or countryside. We inform travellers about local cultures and habits, we inform our travellers that leaving litter in the sea or beach could have very negative consequences to the fish, sea ecosystem and finally themselves.

We inform travellers to be very careful with fire and to avoid open fire during summer, if they would like to go on fishing we suggest them to go with some local fishermen, if they go scuba diving we inform them about diving clubs which will take them to underwater archaeological sights which are protected and conserved. During their diving or snorkelling it is not allowed to take away anything from the sea except feeling good.

We provide tours for small groups (up to 16 people), with small groups we can minimize negative and maximize positive effects of tourism in environment (no matter of location: an island, beach, sea, national park or urban region). We always pick up our litter, we do not cut or damage vegetation, we use beaten paths in fields or forests, our groups are small (average group is up to 16 people) so that group sizes give us better control on tour, better communication and small groups do not disturb any part of nature and environment.

As the transportation is very important in tourism, we support the idea of green transport; cleaner vehicle options which helps area to stay cleaner. We encourage our clients to use public transport and bikes especially when they are on the Islands. We encourage our clients to choose kayaking rather then boat excursions, walking rather than coaching tours and sailing rather then speed boats etc.

Wherever possible we use accommodation providers which support efforts of good environmental practices such as recycling and conservation of water and energy. We encourage our guests and houseowners to save energy by switching of lights and air-conditioning, closing windows and window shades during the day and keep them open during the night, to replace old equipment with new and when it is possible with more energy efficient ones, to use solar and wind energy as much as they can for water heating and lights. We suggest house owners to install water saving devices (low flush toilets, low flow shower heads), to avoid watering gardens during day, to avoid use pumps for the swimming pool (if they have them) during day. We inform our guests that pipe water is drinkable in Croatia and that is very precious.

Social responsibility
Our tours are mix of cultural sights, activities and enjoying the beauty of the landscape. For example during the tour in the national park on Mljet we visit St Mary church (on inlet of St Mary) and there we visit archaeological sights, paying for tickets and taxes to the national park we indirectly support the area including the national park, archaeological sights, local restaurants, domestic people etc. Seasonal pressures: we do marketing campaigns to spread guests through the all seasons (spring, autumn or winter) not just through summer.

We support charities and we donate different to organizations when we can, from individuals to school children associations, last thing we did was Eco cross when we sold t-shirts for all participants in the cross. Altogether there were 120,00 participants and we collected about EUR 1000 (in Croatian currency) and we forwarded it to accounts of two socially handicapped families.