Thailand holiday, culture and beach

Environment

As with all our holidays, the accommodation you will stay at has been chosen to meet at least our basic environmental criteria, which include putting in place measures to conserve energy and reduce water usage and providing advice on how you can reduce your own footprint while you’re there. All the places you stay at buy their food locally, cutting down transport emissions and helping local farmers. Many of them have also been awarded the ASEAN Green Leaf certification which additionally covers air quality, waste management and co-operation with communities, amongst other areas.

On this particular itinerary, we’ve incorporated a river journey up to the north of Thailand in order to cut out the usual internal flight, which also allows you to experience Thai rural life up close and the splendid former capitals of Sukhothai and Ayuthaya. Along the way you’ll stay at the ‘Country Lake’, a forest lodge created by our partners, which aims to develop ecotourism in the less-visited central region of Thailand. In Chiang Mai you’ll visit elephants at the Elephant Nature Park, which we have chosen for their high standards of animal care.

We see protecting the environment as crucially important, so we have chosen Thai partners that active promote higher environmental standards in Thai tourism as part of the Green Leaf Foundation. They are also developing new kinds of holidays that combine ecotourism and community tourism, for example working with the Doi Tung royal project which helps hill tribe people to protect their lands and traditions, or creating holidays at organic farms and the Petchaburi wildlife centre.

Community

Creating social and economic benefits for local people is the central goal of our company and as such we try to incorporate meaningful encounters with local people throughout our trips, never ‘human zoos’. For example, on the Thailand Highlights tour you will have the chance to stop at a villager’s house near the famous floating markets to learn about traditional methods of making brown palm sugar, part of the rich culinary heritage of the area.

We support community-based tourism projects which help preserve traditional culture and resource management, especially with hill tribes in the north. Our Thai partner is also working with CBT-I to implement best practice in visits to these communities, training their guides to act as a bridge to the people they visit and letting them show what they want and are proud of to visitors (which may be ‘non-traditional’). This concept of the community being in control is very different to the mainstream of hill tribe tourism which tends towards pre-packaged ‘ethnic’ experiences and degrading gawking. On a national level, they have pioneered synergy training, bringing together hotels, tour operators and communities to better understand each others’ needs and so create more sustainable and enjoyable holidays. We are proud to be taking part in the push for stronger responsibility in the huge, and often destructive, Thai tourism market.