Sustainability

Below is a snippet of our Green Print; NZ Travel Brokers policy on sustainable environmental, social, and community responsibility.

Our Green Print is a living document that outlines our guidelines and principles on how we sell travel and interact with our communities.

Travel brings enormous benefits to our business, our clients, and our communities; it inspires, it educates, it provides income, and it breaks down barriers between people. But the way we travel comes with costs – ones we are all increasingly aware of.

As a travel provider focused on sustainability, we aim to ensure our clients experience the world safely, without harming the places they explore.

The Green Print looks at our responsibilities from four angles:

• Environmental welfare
  Ensuring we are minimising our footprint on the environment. This means offering our clients opportunities to offset their carbon, promoting suppliers with commitments to sustainable operations and looking at our own environmental footprint and how we operate.
• Animal welfare
  Ensuring we support operators and experiences that have a high level of animal welfare. To this end, we have sought guidance from World Animal Protection to help us ensure we are selling products that put the welfare of animals first.
• Social welfare
  Ensuring we support operators and experiences that support the communities our clients visit. Ideally operators will have policies and guidelines aimed at promoting the wellbeing of their employees, and the communities where they operate, particularly where their product involves indigenous peoples.
• Cultural welfare
  Ensuring we embrace Aotearoa’s core values of:
  • Manaakitanga, showing aroha to our people and community;
  • Kaitiakaitanga, guardianship and conservation of the land;
  • Tiaki, our duty of care for people and place.
    We are committed to the Tiaki Promise to care for New Zealand for now and the future and extend this philosophy to the wider global village we operate within.

The Green Print is built around 4 principles:

1. Avoid causing harm where possible
   We will pass along expert knowledge to our clients, so they can have the best holiday experience imaginable and have the necessary information to make choices to minimise any harm caused.
   We will not knowingly sell experiences that are cruel to animals, or humans.
2. Where harm is caused, balance it out
   Often, our choices aren’t perfect ones. Every airfare sold comes with a cost of carbon emissions and/or single-use plastics. We will provide our clients with alternatives that have a lesser impact, or the opportunity to equalise any harm caused with a positive offset.
   This could be information on relevant carbon offset programs for their flights and/or offer different destinations not impacted by over-tourism.
3. Be a Good Sort and look for opportunities to help
   There’s more to our business than selling travel and sending people to other places. Where we have the means and opportunity we will make an effort to help others.
   This could involve supporting causes that are meaningful to us, promoting charitable efforts to our clients, or anything else that makes a difference to someone’s (or something’s) life.
4. The choice is ultimately the clients
   It is our role to pass along knowledge from our expert partners, not make decisions for our clients, however, we recognise we have a part to play in presenting information that allows for a considered decision.

 

If you would like some tips on what you can do to be a more sustainable traveller, you can check out a brochure we have put together here!