Vietnam and Cambodia holiday, Hanoi to Siem Reap

Planet

We know that tourism and the development required to support it will always have some kind of impact on the local environment and ecosystems. It is our duty as tour operators, and as travellers, to strive to ensure that we support and make positive impacts, while also aiming to reduce any negative impacts as much as possible. We know that making the positive difference we aim to achieve will not be an easy task.

The impacts we have as travellers, and operators, extend beyond the immediate locations we travel to, and include our office operations, the way we travel between places, the things we buy and use in destinations, and what we take with us and leave behind.

Our office operations have been updated to vastly reduce the amount of paper and ink used, and we have a strict policy of only using recycled paper for printing and recycling and re-using any waste paper produced. By moving to a mainly home-working team, we have also reduced the CO2 emissions we produce through commuter travel.

We design our itineraries to avoid domestic flights and the associated CO2 emissions as much as possible, by using overnight sleeper trains or ferries between islands, for example. We also try to design some city tours to be done on foot as much as possible and reduce the amount of driving each day.

In Cambodia, we avoid flying between Phnom Penh and Angkor Wat, and do this journey by road instead, which we feel is much more interesting and allows for some rewarding stops en-route.

In Vietnam, we avoid domestic flights as much as possible, and instead take advantage of the overnight sleeper train journey on the Reunification Express from Hanoi to Hue for that long journey. We feel this provides a much better experience, allowing you to see more of the country you are travelling through and to mingle with local travellers, while also reducing CO2 emissions.

Drinking water and the waste associated with single-use plastic water bottles is something we are working hard on in all our destinations. We encourage travellers to bring their own water bottles, and are also rolling out a program of providing large water canisters on group tours instead of small bottles, and offering filtered water bottles to travellers, which can vastly reduce waste generated by our customers on an ongoing basis after their tour with us.

We encourage energy saving on our tours by asking travellers to turn off all air-conditioning, lights, and electronics when leaving their hotel rooms. Littering at any of the sites must also be avoided. If trash cans are not available, we facilitate the collection and later disposal of any waste generated during our tours.

Many of the sites we visit on our tours are seen as natural wonders. We encourage our travellers to treat these sites as such, sticking to marked paths, not picking wild plants or flowers, and avoiding disturbing the local wildlife as much as possible.

People

In Cambodia, we include homestay visits in the forests outside Angkor Wat, and offer options for cooking classes and other activities arranged by local families and organisations.

In Vietnam, we support local communities in several different locations by taking you away from the main tourist sites and into the countryside, where you can spend time exploring and eating with local families.

We aim to use only Cambodian and Vietnamese guides on the tour, who can provide both historical information and local insights. The vast majority of hotels used are locally-owned rather than international chains.

Throughout our long tourism business journey, exceeding 20 years of operations in the Middle East and Asia in particular, we have succeeded in establishing strong links with many of the communities we are dealing with in our host destinations.

We believe that the Responsible Travel concept has to be a two-way strategy, with both the travellers and the local community gaining benefits. We benefit the local communities we visit using a wide scope of activities that have a positive impact on the local economy, directly by donating money to charity organizations, financially supporting some local communities and by recruiting employees who belonging to the local community. We aim to use locally-owned hotels instead of international chains, and encourage our guests to buy local products and make use of services provided in the communities they travel through. We help indirectly through the experiences and cultural exchanges that take place between the local population and the travellers during our tours.

We promise to try to support the local community of every destination we take our travellers to. We do this by employing local guides, using local handicraft shops, and recommending shops to our travellers so that their holiday spending contributes to the people of that country. Furthermore, we provide each traveller with a tipping guide or arrange a tipping kitty that will help to ensure that those numerous people working hard to make sure our holidays run smoothly and are a great experience, are rewarded as they should be.

We also try to consider the social and cultural aspects of the local community and how to respect the customs and traditions of its inhabitants. Our tour notes will provide advance information on dress codes and particular local customs, and our guides will expand on this in their explanations during the tour. This means we can create valuable and rewarding opportunities for our travellers and allow local people to mingle and exchange ideas and thoughts without causing any unintended offence.

By creating long-lasting relationships with our local ground handling agents and partners, and ensuring our sales consultants visit the destinations they are selling, we are able to establish what needs the communities we visit have, and ensure that our travellers are also informed appropriately.