Travel, though life changing at times, can put a huge pressure on natural resources and local tradition and culture. When we travel, sometimes we forget just how much we take from nature and how much we leave behind that can destroy fragile ecosystems. We, at Beyonder, firmly believe in traveling responsibly – traveling in ways which can help the local communities earn their livelihood and also leave as less environmental footprints as possible.
We are a young organization. Nevertheless, doing the right thing from the start is important for us. We believe, we all have a shared responsibility to ensure a sustainable future for our community and our future generations. To this end, we have decided to treat the Sustainability criteria issued by the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) very seriously; it is our guiding light, we apply the spirit of the principles in our operations and we aim to comply with the criteria to the extent possible, given the size of our activities. We ensure that with every travel we leave footprints only in the memory and not in the places we have visited.
Sustainable Tourism has different dimensions – for us it means a profound respect for the communities we interact with, preserving the environment, ensuring fair economic compensation to all stakeholders, disseminating knowledge about the cultural heritage of the destination and operating a good ethical value system in our organization.
How do we walk the talk on Sustainability? We are not perfect and we are not there as yet. We assimilate the principles in our conduct of work; we try to enforce them in our contracts with our local partners to the extent possible; we educate our travelers on these principles and enforce a contractual compliance with the more important criteria. We have now partnered with Grow-trees.com to contribute a part of our revenues to the mission of growing trees – a small attempt at carbon-offsetting.