Every first call I take opens with the same three questions: is this operator genuinely responsible, does any of my money reach the people who live there, and am I being sold a story. After eighteen years of building tailor-made itineraries, I wrote down the answers I actually give.
The demand is real, the supply is thin
Booking.com's 2023 travel study put numbers on something I hear weekly. Seventy-six per cent of global travellers say they want to travel more sustainably, and over half of them do not know how. Around seventy per cent say they would be more likely to book with a company that offers sustainable options, yet only thirty-nine per cent have ever been shown such an option while booking. That gap between intent and availability is where clients get stuck, and it is precisely where an advisor earns the fee.
Ask for evidence, not adjectives
Words like eco, green and responsible are unregulated, so I ask operators for the paperwork behind them before I show a client a single price. If the answers arrive quickly, the claim usually holds. If they arrive with a brochure instead, we keep looking.
- Which certification or audit covers the property, and when does it next expire.
- What share of staff live in the village or neighbourhood the trip visits.
- Where the waste water and the food actually come from.
- Who owns the company: a local partnership, a family, or a brand far away.
Put the community in the itinerary, not the footnote
A responsible trip is not a temple visit plus a donation box. I build the days so that local hosts are paid for their time at a rate they set, that at least one meal a day is cooked and served by people who live on the route, and that the group arrives when the place is open to residents rather than only to tours. If a day cannot answer the question who benefits from this, I rewrite the day.
Price the trip honestly
Cheap quotes usually hide the cost somewhere else: unpaid guides, a coach company paid below minimum rate, or a hotel that wins on price by cutting its water use in a dry region. I show clients three lines instead of one total: what the operator keeps, what goes to the ground, and what leaves the country. A quote that cannot be split that way tends to fall apart on arrival.
Say what is not included
Flights are the heaviest part of almost every long-haul trip, and they rarely appear in a responsible travel pitch. I state the transfer times, the internal flights, and the number of hotel changes up front, because five rooms in nine nights is a different footprint from two rooms in nine nights even when the brochure looks identical.
Two questions before you sign anything
These two catch most of what the marketing language hides.
- Who is paid when this trip is cancelled, and how much of my deposit survives a cancellation three weeks out.
- What would you change about this itinerary if I told you the dates are fixed and the budget is not.
The second question is my favourite to be asked. An operator who answers it with a specific route change instead of a reassurance is usually an operator I am happy to put in front of a client.