Off the beaten track holiday in Central India

Planet

This trip has been especially curated to mean it involves no internal flights.

All accommodation providers supply filtered water so that the use of plastic water bottles is unnecessary.

All guests are given a stainless steel bottle at the start of their holiday (10% of the proceeds of which goes to FRANK Water) to encourage the use of filtered water rather than single use plastic.

Although jeep safaris are included in our tour we try to focus on safaris that can be offered on foot or by boat as of equal value and we discourage tiger obsessed tours. Our guests are all given a Photographic Guide to the Wildlife of Central India (a publication we helped get off the ground with an initial pre-publication advance purchase of 100 copies) to encourage guests to look for birds and butterflies and the myriad other creatures that inhabit the forest, not just tigers.

Very few of our accommodation providers outside of big cities offer Air Conditioning, most instead are built with the environment in mind using natural materials that stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

Most accommodation providers use solar power or small wood fired 'Gujarati' boilers for water heating.

People

All accommodation providers employ a majority of local staff. The leader of this company, although British, speaks decent Hindi and one of the first things she does when establishing whether somewhere has good employment practices is to ask how long staff have been there - if everyone says less than a year she realises it is not a good working environment, if most people have been there several years it gets a tick. She also asks discreetly about living quarters and the quality of staff food.

In all destinations we offer tours lead by local guides and many for specifically community minded organisations: for example the walk with the Pardhis in Panna employs former poaching community members to share their in depth forest knowledge with our guests; our tours in Mumbai are lead by an organisation which puts 80% of its profits back into the community.

A day trip to Dhar is offered where guests can see the amazing work done by PSI in getting access to safe water for communities. Guests are encouraged to make a £100 donation to PSI's supporters FRANK water and in our experience all guests who have had the opportunity to see first had the impact FRANK has, become fairly devoted supporters.