Ecuador vacation, Darwin's Ecuador

Planet and people

During our stay in Guamote we are proud to support the Inti Sita community project, an enterprise set up to help the indigenous communities improve their living conditions through education and co-operative ventures. Profits from the guesthouse are used to run several educational workshops including computer classes, textile designs and music classes as well as providing a kindergarten for local children whose parents cannot afford pre-schooling.

This trip supports and stays at two award winning eco-loges all with strong community ties that allow the profits from tourism to go directly into local communities: The Black Sheep Inn in Chugchilan and Bellavista Cloud forest reserve apa.

In South America we use local ground handlers - this means that all the operational costs go directly into the local economy and helps to improve employment opportunities in remote regions. By incorporating home-stays, locally owned hotels, restaurants and the services of guides and drivers into our itineraries, we ensure that money you spend on your trip goes directly into the local economy and local communities benefit from tourism.

When you take one of our trips, we automatically make a contribution to “Carbon Clear” – an organisation who work with hundreds of organisations to measure their carbon footprint and reduce their carbon emissions.

We also support emergency relief efforts in the areas we travel to, such as the Pakistan Earthquake Fund set up in 2005 and a variety of other community benefiting NGOs around the world. We also support several other NGOs around the world such as the Hope Foundation, Tibetan schools trust and Adopt-A-Minefield, which are all carefully selected to improve the standard of living for the communities we visit.