When asked what you have missed most since the onset of the pandemic, most people answer as quick as a reflex: travel. Whether it’s the allure of hearing ‘your captain speaking’, soaking in the new smells and sights of a foreign land, or sharing a layover with other weary adventure-seekers – ah, how we’ve missed it.
But as much as many of us are longing to dust off the passports and head on our latest adventure, spare a thought for the travel companies who have been effectively ground to a halt these past few years.
As the world’s largest travel B Corp, Intrepid has been looking for ways to give back to local communities and positively affect the environment since day one. On a mission to create positive change through the joy of travel, here’s what that looks like in 2022 as international travel resumes and we venture ‘Behind The B’ with Intrepid’s General Manager of Purpose, Sara King.
Photo by Chait Goli from Pexels
Our mission is to create positive change through the joy of travel and since the start of the pandemic, we’ve thought hard about how to evolve our offerings to benefit even more people, including our customers, suppliers and communities.
We believe travel has never been more important – we need to reconnect, experience different cultures, find mutual understanding, and once again have those shared experiences and conversations.
We’re here – and here to do good – for both people and the planet. Here are five things you might not know about our small group sustainable adventures in 2022:
1. Supporting communities closer to home
Sure, we’re the world’s largest adventure travel company, operating trips in 100+ countries, but did you know we also offer hundreds of life-changing experiences in our customers’ backyards?
This is a win-win. Our customers benefit from greater choice and the ability to rediscover their own country, without the need to take a long-haul flight. For local communities and small businesses, our trips contribute to their economic recovery and rejuvenation.
In Australia, our customers can now choose from 66 itineraries, including 21 new trips that have been introduced since the start of the pandemic. From walking the iconic Larapinta Trail in the Northern Territory to taking on a cycling challenge in South Australia, we have more sustainable local adventures than ever before.
It’s not just about offering more trips, though. We’ve thought deeply about how these trips can have positive impacts on communities including how First Nations peoples can benefit more from tourism.Since July 2020, we’ve grown the number of Torres Strait Islander tourism experiences on our trips by 300 per cent. All tour leaders in Australia have completed cultural awareness training and are encouraged to develop and deliver their own Acknowledgement of Country at the start of each trip. These are just a few examples of our first steps in our reconciliation journey in Australia and we look forward to advancing much further in the future.
Photo by mali maeder from Pexels
2. Creating better experiences with values-aligned partners
B Corps know that our communities and partnerships make us better businesses. For Intrepid, that means partnering with like-minded organisations to enhance our trips.
One example is our partnership with WWF-Australia on selected Antarctica voyages. This supports vital research into the migration patterns of whales and enriches travellers’ experience via onboard citizen science programs.
Another is our collaboration with MEET Network, founded by IUCN-Med. This association supports ecotourism in the Mediterranean and allows our customers to experience nature-based experiences in little-visited areas of Crete and Croatia.
Local communities benefit from tourism, while customers enjoy activities in pristine national parks, stay in homestays and learn more about the local culture and languages.
Photo by Annastills
3. Embedding impact in our trips to benefit more people
We’ve always been a responsible travel company and, as travel rebounds, we’re doubling down on our efforts to include even more purpose-led experiences – from wildlife and environmental conservation, minority cultural heritage preservation, gender equality, female employment and more – into our trips.
All of our trips are led by local leaders and support communities and, recently, we have introduced 22 new impact experiences across 14 countries. Experiences include an e-rickshaw company in Jaipur in India, which generates employment for more than 200 women from low-income households; a foundation dedicated to cleaning waste in Halong Bay in Vietnam; and a community-based tourism organisation that preserves the traditions of the Maleku, one of the smallest indigenous communities in Costa Rica.
This means our customers can enjoy the holiday of a lifetime, while knowing that their trip benefits local communities.
4. Designing decarbonised trips
There’s no getting around it – travel and tourism are significant carbon emitters and, pre-pandemic, contributed to about eight per cent of global emissions.
Intrepid’s climate journey started way back in 2005, and in 2010, we became carbon neutral, which means every trip is 100 per cent carbon offset. We are proud of that, but with global warming accelerating, we soon realised that was not enough.In 2020, Intrepid became the first global tour operator with a verified target by the Science Based Targets Initiative. This means we’re committed to reducing our carbon emissions by the pace and scale that science tells us is necessary to limit global warming to 1.5°C, in line with the Paris Agreement. We continue to offset unavoidable emissions, and are committed to reducing the carbon we produce as a business.
Photo by Shaun Busuttil
For our trips that means environmental considerations and decarbonisation are increasingly embedded into our product development. We’ve reviewed our 100 top-selling trips to identify flights under 90 minutes that could be removed, where a suitable alternative exists. We’ve removed short-haul flights from five itineraries in Borneo, Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Egypt. We’ve also accelerated product development of trips with lower carbon emissions such as walking and trekking.
In the past 12 months, walking and trekking has accounted for nearly a third of all our new trips. And with the help of The Intrepid Foundation, we’re investing in an innovative project in Tasmania to restore the disappearing kelp forests – our first step to becoming climate positive.
5. Our trips transform our customers lives for the better
Through our recent B Corp recertification process, we surveyed our customers to understand more about how our trips impact them. This provided us with an opportunity to demonstrate whether we’re fulfilling our mission, and we identified three elements where we believe travel has a positive impact:
- Education – often through knowledge shared by our local tour guides
- Cultural connection – through homestays or community-led experiences
- Physical and mental wellbeing – through active travel or wellbeing experiences
Then we asked people how they felt about these three elements after travelling with us. Our survey results showed that nearly all Intrepid customers experienced a positive impact through education (99 per cent), culture (98 per cent) and health and wellbeing (91 per cent). Interestingly, it was the education aspect that had the greatest impact on the enjoyment of their trip.
Increased knowledge and education were named by 69 per cent of people as the most important benefit of travel, followed by cultural connection. Travellers told us they loved learning about the daily lives of local people, the history and culture of destinations and hearing stories and insights from their guides.
Some even reported long-term changes, with two-thirds saying that their travel experience motivated them to improve their lives. One customer told us: “I’m much more aware of different cultures and experiences when meeting other people and understanding why things are happening in the world,” and another quit their job and changed careers.
This survey helps us to understand the broader impacts of travel on our customers and informs us to create travel products that harness those learning moments.
It also provided our team with insights as they develop new trips, and reminds them of the ways in which they’re contributing to making the world a more open minded, compassionate, and joyful place through travel.
Thank you to Intrepid for this fantastic piece, published as part of B Corp Month 2022 as we invite you #BehindTheB to uncover what makes a B Corp a better business.
Find out more about the B Corp Climate Collective, a group of Certified B Corporations and other businesses working to halt and reverse the current climate trajectory ↗
