Working in sustainability and Community-Based-Tourism since 2009, we have become real experts in the field. However, it is always possible to go even further. By measuring the impact of each of the experiences we offer on our platform, we have taken our work to the next level. This way, we hope to increase sensitization among our customers and partners, and bring more people in the boat to make this planet a better place.
Bringing positive change to Peru through sustainable tourism is the common goal that every member of our team strives to achieve, that binds us together and motivates us to never stop what we are doing. Without it, we wouldn’t be where we are today and our work wouldn’t have the same value.
Therefore, we wanted to give the concept of sustainability the attention it deserves within our company, and carry out a project analyzing its true outcome. Measuring the impact of our tours in terms of sustainability, seemed to be the perfect way of doing that. So, we decided to give it a go.
If you want to find out what the scores displayed for each tour mean, how they were elaborated and how they can guide you throughout our website, read on as we will explain to you everything you need to know about them.
The Sustainability Scores are destined to motivate our travelers to think more about their impact before, during and after traveling to Peru (and other countries). Of course, all of our tours deserve their place on the website thanks to their efforts in sustainability, and you can’t go wrong with any of them. The score itself is mainly about spreading awareness about the subject. While scrolling through our experiences, we want you to ask yourself “what makes this tour sustainable” and to familiarize yourself with the idea and different actions you can take as a traveler.
Next to communicating with our clients, we want to incentivize our providers to work on the sustainability of their products. Without access to responsible tours in Peru, you as visitors would have a hard time traveling with peace of mind. Therefore, we have to make sure that what we offer you, actually goes hand in hand with what we preach for. By working on sustainability with our providers, we are able to identify what positively contrasts them from others, but also find out where there is potential to improve. Thus, we have embarked on a mutual journey towards more responsible tours with them.
As part of her master’s program in tourism management, Caroline, who is now a proud member of our team, has taken on the task of elaborating the Sustainability Scores.
After having assembled as much information as possible about the subject, she has chosen the most relevant and comparable indicators to analyze. Based on these indicators, she has elaborated a survey, which she used to conduct interviews about every tour we offer on our platform. Participants were all of our providers, as well as members of RESPONS itself.
During the interviews, Caroline retrieved quantitative and qualitative data of every tour. According to these answers, she attributed a score to each of the indicators and used them to calculate the total score.
Even though many exact numbers were retrieved in the interviews, the evaluation of the tours also included a more “human” part. The tours differ a lot from each other depending on whether they are Culinary Tours, Nature Tours or Hiking Tours, for example. Therefore, they are not always perfectly comparable. To be fair in our evaluation anyways, we have given every provider the opportunity to express anything they want about the sustainability of their tour, and we have taken into account if they are working on a really great project that deserves to be rewarded.
First of all: no score is bad! All tours that we offer on our platform have been carefully selected and are great examples of sustainable experiences. So, you definitely don’t have to refrain from booking a tour because its score is a little lower than another one.
Instead, we want sustainability to be omnipresent on our website so that our travelers don’t lose sight of it when planning their trip to Peru. We’d simply like you to always keep your impact in mind, not to demonize any of the tours or complicate things too much.
However, we did indeed go ahead and calculate the score of an ideal tour, which is a Multi-Day Tour that would obtain all of the points possible in every measured category. The score that such a tour would achieve, is approximately 50. This is, therefore, the best possible score in our system and you can use it as a reference. The stars filling out the circle around the score are another indicator of how close the tour gets to the maximum.
If you are wondering why the best possible tour is a Multi-Day Tour rather than a Day Tour, this is because we advocate slow travel. By staying in one destination for a longer time, you increase positive impact on the local people, engage more in cultural exchange and reduce your carbon footprint as you take less transport. We always encourage travelers to do fewer trips, but longer ones. Therefore, we consider the longer experience on our platform as more sustainable, and they tend to have higher scores.
In any case, a simple score without any extra information is not very significant or helpful when you choose your tour. First of foremost, it is just a number. Therefore, every score comes accompanied by a small description giving more details. For every tour, you can find this description here:
In this section, you can see in what sense the chosen tour is sustainable. Some experiences include great environmental projects, for example. Of course, our Jungle Tours all have a high score when it comes to nature conservation. Other experiences, such as our City Tours, focus more on social and cultural values. They enable you to get in contact with local people and learn about their customs and traditions, which makes their scores rise. Depending on what you are most interested in and what kind of project you want to support, you can use the description to find the perfect experience for you.
Measuring tours in terms of their sustainability is something very new and innovative. Some theories exist that have already looked into it and people are definitely showing more and more interest in such projects. Travelers, for their part, have a stronger will to travel sustainably than ever before. However, they do still struggle to put their will into practice, sometimes. By elaborating and showing the sustainability scores on our platform, we have applied the theory to a specific case, namely to all of the tours you can book with us. We hope it helps to decrease the gap between people’s willingness to travel sustainably and their actual behavior.
As you might have expected, we will not stop at this point. In the future, we will upload more and more RESPONSible experiences to our new platform, to make sure every traveler finds the tour they are looking for. As we do that, we will continue interviewing more providers, be it the ones that we already work with, or also new ones that we will start collaborating with. The scores and the way of calculating them will be perfected and their presentation on the platform might be subject to change. In any case, we hope to learn more about the subject as we go forward and become specialists in the field.
Discover Lake Titicaca in an authentic way on the lesser visited Taquile island, spending time with a family that will share their ancestral culture with you.
Enjoy off-the-beaten-path and unique places of the south coast desert, combining natural beauty, wildlife, communities, archaeology and history.
