With thanks to Michael Poliza and Wilderness Safaris for the use of photographs 1,3 and 4 above.

As members of AITO we recognise that in carrying out our work as Tour Operators, we have a responsibility to respect other people’s ways of life. We acknowledge that wherever a Tour Operator does business or sends clients, it has a potential to do both good and harm and we are aware that all too often in the past the harm has outweighed the good.

All tourism potentially has an environmental, social and economic impact on the destination involved. We accept, therefore that we should aim to be responsible in all our dealings on each of these levels. To help us do so, here is a set of guidelines intended to help companies, customers and local suppliers recognise common responsibilities.

OUR GUIDELINES

Within AITO, we are an association of individual, independent companies and each member company has its own distinctive style and field of operation. As such, we each have our ways of fulfilling the details of these responsibilities by establishing our own policies and involving our staff and informing our clients about Responsible Tourism and, where appropriate,

• encouraging them to participate
• working with our suppliers and partners to achieve responsible goals and practices
• publicising good practice to encourage and spread Responsible Tourism

What this means in practice

Responsible Tourism starts in the office and some examples of our commitment to best practices are as follows: we use energy efficient light bulbs, we turn off all office equipment when not in use overnight, we re-use printed paper as note paper, we minimise the amount of paper we use by emailing where possible. Our policy in the office is that every little helps.

In the field, we have introduced numerous measures to ensure that we are following a policy of Responsible Tourism. We provide every single one of our clients with a list of guidelines before they depart on how they can reduce the impact of tourism on their destination and, if they wish, how they can actively contribute to community or conservational interests.

We make sure that the lodges, camps and parks that we recommend have a solid environmental and conservational policy. Indeed, most of the lodges we recommend work hand in hand with local communities and provide support through employment and improvement of local facilities such as schools and clinics. Many lodges operate as partnerships with local communities and some are run entirely by the local people through community trusts and organisations. As individuals, we each personally support an African charity of our choice from sponsoring a child through school to supporting a wildlife rehabilitation charity.