Keeping it honest – Choosing our hotels and holidays
We strongly believe responsible tourism is a process, a journey, and an ideal to aspire for.
Different tourism businesses look at responsibility differently.
Some see a social problem that can be tackled or resolved using responsible tourism as a tool to raise visibility and funds for the cause. Other businesses recognise that taking responsibility for their ecological, social and economic environment is the only way to be successful in the long run. And there are yet others who run successful local tourism businesses who want to give back to their community and environment.
We applaud all these different types of responsibility-in-action that are making a genuine effort to care for the places that you as a traveller love to visit. And encouraging those who are making this effort, by telling their story to the world, and channelling travellers who appreciate what they do, we hope to motivate other businesses to also become more responsible.
Traveltocare.com is not a certification agency to accommodations or tour operators for responsible tourism. We do not use any quantitative tool for measurement, nor do we apply any rating system or benchmark against which we compare accommodations and holidays.
We invite accommodations to list with us, based on a qualitative assessment of their commitment to the principles and practices of responsible tourism, a combination of our knowledge of local destinations in India, and the unique local experiences that these properties in these destinations offer.
Our process for listing an accommodation is as follows:
Whenever we receive a request to join Travel To Care, we first ask each potential accommodation to conduct a self-assessment of their responsible practices by filling in a preliminary checklist of responsible practices, based on the triple bottomline of environmental, economic, and socio-cultural responsibilities. This gives us an initial measure of the commitment of the hotel.
Based on the responses in the preliminary self-assessment, we then send one of our team of travel writers to personally visit the hotel, conduct a detailed interview with the owners, experience the hotel first hand, and verify the responsible tourism practices mentioned in the self-assessment.
Details of the responsible tourism criteria we use are listed here.
- Environmental responsibility criteria
- Social and economic responsibility criteria
- Cultural responsibility criteria
A detailed, insider review of the hotel is prepared by our writers and handed over to our team in Chennai, India. Here the review is checked by our local editors and then uploaded by them onto our website, after an agreement is signed with the accommodation owners.
We cannot always visit an accommodation immediately or in isolation. Travel is expensive and wasteful if not done efficiently. To minimise the negative impact of air or rail travel for site visits, we often group them together. So at times, an accommodation may be listed on our site as recommended pending a personal visit, which is clearly communicated to all visitors.
Once the accommodation is listed, we rely on travellers to visit our hotels and give us their feedback on the accommodation’s commitment to responsible tourism. Traveller feedback will act as a conscience to our hotels, our website and what we state on it, and on improving the adoption of responsible practices. Accommodations will be given a chance to respond to feedback as well to use it to improve the travellers holiday experience.
If you have any suggestions on how we can improve our process, we’d like to hear about it.