In an episode of the World Nomads Podcast, I spoke with Darrel Wade co-founder of travel company Intrepid and a passionate advocate for sustainable tourism.
The company was founded by Darrell and Geoff ‘Manch’ Manchester after a conversation at university about creating a travel company for people who simply ‘liked to travel like them’.
1: “Our travellers are going on holiday. They don’t want to be burdened with guilt or burdened with worthy kind of acts. They just want to have a great holiday, but you can have a great holiday by traveling sustainably. These things aren’t mutually exclusive, they work well together if you design it properly.
“But when we started out ethical and sustainable probably didn’t even enter our head, to be perfectly honest. I mean, within three or four years I think we started to realize that it was actually a feature of what we were doing, but it was more a fringe benefit rather than actually by design.
“One of our relatively early leaders was based in Borneo for a few years. She came back for a meeting once and she was just saying, “What we do is really quite amazing in terms of the positive impact we have on local communities.” And we just started to think about that a little bit more as to: how is it that our form of tourism does indeed have positive impacts and some forms of tourism don’t necessarily? And how could we kind of extend that and really get the benefit of that, both for the local community and for our travellers? That it has to benefit everyone, otherwise it’s not going to work, you know?”
2: “I don’t really think it’s up to us as a business to preach too much. We inform clients, absolutely, about what the right and wrong thing is because people like to be informed, and they like to be educated, I guess, on some things they don’t understand, like wildlife tourism or carbon emissions as an example.
“What do we do to ensure industry sustainability, to ensure that clients do have a better trip, to ensure that our impacts on local communities and the environment are sound as where you go?
“We start by employing people who know a lot more about this than I do, like anything. And so, we’ve got a responsible business team that work in the office, and that they design practices and policies that are pretty much unseen by our client but ensures that we do the right thing on the ground. And that’s everything from carbon emissions through to animal welfare policy, human rights policies, and so forth.”
3: Turning to climate change, there’s a lot of noise about action. Some action does happen, some action doesn’t happen. The unfortunate reality is our carbon emissions are higher this year than they ever have been in history. We’re up at around 415 parts per million now, I think, heading for 450, that’s unsustainable for the world.”
“… so, we do have issues there that we have to solve. And so, I honestly thought that when we (Intrepid) became carbon neutral I thought a lot more companies by now would be taking similar actions.
“There is actual profit in doing the right thing, and too few companies realize this connection.”
Photo © Brian Rapsey. Clay pot classes in Tanzania.
Who wants to be hit over the head?
Darrel Wade
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