Our Responsible Tourism Policy

Aim

Our Aim is to offer small private group and tailor-made tours to a few handpicked wildlife destinations that we personally know intimately and we have selected them for their beauty and abundance in the wildlife that we want to watch and photograph.

Being founded by a wildlife photographer with over a decade of experience we know the region and its wildlife and want to help nature lovers and photographers to get to the best places for wildlife watching and photography in a responsible way leaving the least negative footprints possible.

Our aim is to be responsible, eco-friendly and a fair company.

We encourage local involvement and intend to hire and use the services of locals wherever possible.

We treat our service providers as equals socially and give them fair wages be it our local guides, drivers or transport providers.

We intend to be foremost in responsible eco-friendly wildlife tourism with focus on serious wildlife watching and photography.

We intend to work towards our goals gradually and consistently.

Wildlife Photo Tours welcomes feedback from all sources which may enable us to perform better in this field. Know more about wildlife photo tours.

Economic Responsibility

For all our wildlife tours we hire only local forest guides, safari drivers, transport providers.

We make sure all our service providers are treated well and equally and paid fair wages.

Our tour leader keeps an eye on good or bad practices and discusses and sorts any issues arising during the tours.

On our Bandhavgarh tour we encourage our photographer participants to get a bean-bag or lens cover made by the local tailor, these are not fancy but very usable and useful, this helps the local tailor get some business and also helps the photographer get a good camera-lens support and cover at very economical price.

Environmental Responsibility

Our tours are small group travel of not more than 2-5 people. We believe that being small helps in leaving minimal negative impact on the fragile environment and in our experience the best wildlife experiences also often happen in small groups, hence improving the quality of our tours.

We promote responsible tourism in wildlife parks, Experts believe that tiger population in tiger tourism areas have increased over the years as compared to parks where tourism is less or not popular.

Wherever possible we stay in responsibly run eco-friendly jungle lodges.

When on safari we use non-diesel vehicles and always try to promote petrol driven vehicles in the park.

We advise our participants not to feed, tease, touch any wildlife and maintain silence as much as possible during safaris.

We advice earth colour clothes e.g. beige, forest green, olive, grey, brown etc those that are not too bright when inside the park. Wildlife tends to avoid bright colours.

We also advice no perfumes, deodorants, anything with strong scent needs to be avoided. Wildlife is very sensitive to smell.

We advice participants to switch of lights, fans, air conditioners when leaving the room. We also advice them to reduce or avoid the use of air conditioners when possible.

We have strictly no smoking policy inside the forest; many forest fire accidents can be avoided by small measures.

We encourage keeping the safety and welfare of wildlife first and foremost before any photography opportunity.

We advice our photographer travelers not to encourage mahouts who sometimes purposely push the elephants towards a tiger to get an aggressive or desired pose. We discourage photography from elephants during tiger shows when such a practice is noticed.

Safari Routes and timings set by the park authorities are strictly followed by us.

We enforce a no paper policy where possible and encourage use of recycled paper.

Wherever possible we try to use electronic medium for most of our documents instead of printed documents.

Social Responsibility

On our tours we try to

Provide employment for local people by using local guides, safari drivers, and transport and locally owned and operated services.

Be of economic benefit to the communities visited by using a variety of local restaurants, shopping in local bazaars and buying locally produced goods.

Encourage respect for local culture, traditions and attire.

Encourage respect to the people we work with and meet.

Educate our participants regarding the local practices when needed.