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Journeys with Meaning
http://journeyswithmeaning.org/
IRTA 2019 Gold Winner, Best Experiential
They offer earth friendly-travel which they claim is “one of the most beautiful ways to take us from theory to practice, from reading to experiencing, and from watching to doing.” All their journeys are designed with local communities and with organisations like the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh and the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives. The guests stay in homestays and guesthouses and eat local food. The judges were impressed by their engagement of their clients in conversations about the challenges of climate change, unbridled consumption and the consequences of irresponsible travel. As they say “we use the time we get with our groups to educate them about inspiring environmental solutions that they can adopt in their lives.” The judges wanted to recognise their commitment to transformative travel and to encourage others to consider adopting a similar approach to achieve change through travel experiences.
Holidays in Rural India
IRTA 2020 'One to Watch', Best Tour Operator
Holidays in Rural India offers carefully curated trips to less-visited parts of India. We believe in slow-paced travel, focussing on a few well-chosen destinations. The company focuses on opening the mid of the tourist and benefitting the local community and/or the wildlife creating tourism that “shows we have more in common than divides us.” The company uses guides as local as possible: “A guest is going to have an infinitely better experience and a villager feel infinitely more comfortable if the visitors are being shown a place that the guide knows like the back of his or her hand.” The company was only registered in 2015 and it has admirable and unusual business principles of not asking for freebies and paying promptly. The judges recognised its ethics and progress to date and look forward to seeing it again in a year or two.
