Responsible tourism policy

Espíritu Travel & Responsible Tourism

We are a specialist travel company with a broad focus on responsible travel.

Our vision is to create and promote experiential and transformative travel which brings the greatest possible benefit to local communities
Responsible Tourism is twofold, first, it requires that travel companies, hotels, governments, and local people take responsibility for the negative impacts that tourism can have and try to mitigate those impacts, taking a more holistic and inclusive approach to the development of tourism. Second, it’s about the traveler, traveling responsibly, doing what one can, enjoying a new destination like normal but being more aware of tourism’s impact and making adjustments to how one travels in order to reduce those negative impacts.

Why is responsible tourism so important?

Tourism is one of the most important and largest business sectors on the planet, it accounts for 11% of the world’s GDP and it employs more people worldwide than any other. It is hard to imagine but your vacation is significantly important to a lot people.

Carbon neutral trips

As responsible citizens of planet earth, we are also painfully aware of the impact humans are having on the climate. Espiritu Travel now offers carbon neutral travel for all trips. We see it as yet another important step in our journey towards creating a more sustainable travel company. Greenhouse gas emissions are calculated for all our customized trips, taking into account the use of fuels in local travel, emissions from food, and energy used in accommodations. We work with Carbon Credit Capital to ensure accurate results and come up with simple metrics like emissions per person, per trip while in-country.


We have chosen to support a carbon offset project in the Amazon rainforest. The project protects over 149,000 hectares of virgin rainforest from deforestation which houses 44,000+ species of plants and animals, including over 30 vulnerable species. The project also provides improved quality of life for over 6,200 local community members—including paths to land ownership, and improved diversity of the local economy with capacity building for cultivating new and highly valuable forest crops and products.  You can find out more about this verified gold standard project here.

Espiritu Travel head office

We run our office in a responsible manner by using fair trade products, reducing our energy usage, as well as recycling. By developing electronic literature, we limit the number of paper materials we produce. In fact, all paper is used on both sides in our office!

We encourage our employees to use public transport or a bicycle to get to work. We all work at home on Fridays.

We encourage responsible travel

We have been proactive in raising awareness about traveling responsible. We provide our travelers with information on how they can reduce their negative impact and make positive contributions to the communities they will visit.

We encourage travelers to

  • fly less and stay longer;
  • respect people’s privacy while taking photographs;
  • not to remove native flora and faunal;
  • seek out and support locally owned businesses, to ensure maximum community benefit;
  • respect native marine life and encourage the use of coral safe sunscreen.
  • carefully choose activities that are animal friendly and do not encourage or support the mistreatment of animals;
  • encourage others to become responsible travelers.

Please visit our country specific web pages to read what we are doing in those particular destinations.