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Explore responsibly, discover offbeat places, guided by locals, rooted in culture.
Let’s help you
plan your journey
Explore responsibly, discover offbeat places, guided by locals, rooted in culture.
Soumen Bhowmick
A slow traveller, road trip enthusiast, Soumen travels to understand how places breathe beyond maps and itineraries. A road tripper at heart, he finds meaning in country roads, small conversations, changing landscapes, and the quiet stories that unfold between destinations. That same instinct now shapes how he designs journeys for organisations, MICE, brand drives, product launches and CSR initiatives built the same way: around people, place and what's real, not what's scripted.
Most advice on responsible travel in India is a list of things for the traveller to remember, and the traveller is the last person to arrive. By then somebody else has already chosen the route, the stays, the transport and every activity on the list. What decides whether a journey is responsible is what went into the plan, which is why the useful questions are the ones you ask before you book.
This is written from the planning side, because that is the side I work on. Some of what follows argues against advice you have probably read, including advice I used to repeat. Where I think the common version is wrong, I have said so and given the reason.
It started as something quite specific and it has ended up meaning almost nothing. That is the whole problem in one sentence, and the interesting part is how it happened.
The phrase was coined in 2000 by two people, Justin Francis and Harold Goodwin, out of academic work on tourism and development. It was not a slogan. It came with a definition, a set of criteria and a process for checking whether a holiday actually met them. Trips were screened. Operators were asked to write policies and were held to them. Results were published, including the bad ones.
So there was a standard, and there was a method for testing whether you met it.
Then the word got out. It turned out to be a very good word, and within a few years it was on the website of almost every company that wanted it. What travelled was the label. What stayed behind was the checking.
So a company can call itself responsible today without saying anything at all. Nobody asks what was screened. Nobody asks what the criteria were. Nobody asks who checked.
That is not a failure of the idea. The people who built it did the work and published it. It is a failure of everybody who took the word afterwards and left the rest of it on the table.
Because there is nothing to fail. The word carries no test, so writing it costs a company one line on a web page and commits them to nothing.
Compare it with a word like organic. That one is a mess in plenty of ways, but somebody still has to come and inspect. A hotel star rating is thin, but somebody has to award it. Responsible has neither. There is no body, no audit, no register and no consequence for saying it.
This is why the advice ended up pointing at the traveller. If the company cannot be measured, the only person left to give instructions to is the person buying the ticket. Carry your waste. Use less water. Buy local. Respect the customs.
All of that is correct and none of it should be dropped. I do it, and you should too. Ordinary manners in an unfamiliar place are worth learning properly and they matter more than most people think.
But look at the order of events. A traveller sees an itinerary that is already finished. The route is set. The nights are booked. The activities are chosen. The transport is arranged. The people they will meet, and the people they will never meet, were decided weeks earlier by somebody they have never spoken to.
Then, at the very end of that chain, we hand them a list of things to remember and call the outcome their responsibility.
There is a second reason the list persists. It is easy to write and it costs nothing to publish. A page of traveller instructions can go up in an afternoon. Describing what a company actually decided, and who received the money, takes work and can be checked.
It also quietly moves the subject. A list about behaviour is a list about not doing harm. Very little of it is about whether anything was helped.
The ones about what fills each slot in the day, and who receives the money for it. Almost none of them are visible on a brochure, and all of them are made before a traveller sees anything.
Start with the one everybody asks about, which is where people sleep. The honest answer is that there is no fixed rule and there cannot be one. Homestays, family-run places, community-run places, boutique eco properties, luxury hotels. Which of them appears in a plan depends on the traveller's budget, what they need, and what the destination actually has. Some places have no homestay at all.
Any company telling you that a set percentage of their nights are in community stays is either not telling the truth or turning customers away. An operator works with what exists in a place.
So the accommodation is not where this is decided. The activities are.
It helps to see what visiting on its own does and does not achieve. The Paradesi Synagogue at Mattancherry in Kochi takes somewhere between six hundred and a thousand visitors a day. The community that built it in 1568 is down to about five people. Nobody did anything wrong there. The building is in good repair and the visitors are respectful. But they came to see a building, and what was disappearing was a community, and a ticket cannot help with the second one.
That is the difference worth holding on to. Visiting preserves the thing you look at. It does not, on its own, preserve the thing that made it.
Here is what that looks like in practice, and every one of these is the same slot in the same day, filled differently.
Instead of buying tickets for a city tour, bungee jumping or river rafting, the time goes to a local school. Time is arranged for people to actually talk to each other. Things are donated that are hard to get in that part of the country. The traveller spends a similar amount of money and a similar amount of time. It lands somewhere else entirely.
Instead of a restaurant bill, lunch happens in somebody's home, and what changes hands is a gratuity rather than an invoice. No margin is taken out in the middle. The household is paid directly by the people who ate the food.
Instead of a guide sent by an agency, the day uses a local guide. Where it fits, it also uses a storyteller, an hour with an artisan, or time with an artist. This is the one that compounds. A craft survives when somebody can make a living from it. Raghurajpur is the proof. Its painting tradition came close to dying out in the middle of the last century, and it was carried through because one person went out and built a market for it.
And instead of riding an animal, a jeep. A jeep burns fuel and that is a real cost, so this is a trade and not a clean win. But it is a trade worth making, and the forest departments set most of these rules anyway. What moves them faster than regulation is what visitors keep asking for.
Notice what the traveller has to do in all four cases. Nothing. They turn up and the day happens. Every decision that made it responsible was taken before they arrived, by somebody whose job it was.
That is the shift worth arguing for. Not a better list for the traveller, but a plan built so that the right things happen whether or not anybody remembers them.
The same logic applies to a route. Choosing country roads over a highway is not a scenic preference, and I have written about why I keep doing it. A highway moves you past places without stopping at any of them. Small roads put money into small towns because that is where you eat, refuel and sleep.
Often not, and this is where a lot of well-meant advice does actual harm.
The rule you will see everywhere is that small groups are more responsible. It sounds obviously right. Fewer people, less pressure, less damage.
Now think about what it means on the ground. Say a park allows a hundred jeeps. Each of those jeeps was bought by somebody local, usually on a loan, and each supports a driver and often a guide. The capacity was worked out by the forest department, which is the body that actually studies what that ecosystem can carry.
A company that insists on taking six people where the destination can host six hundred has not protected anything. The other ninety-nine jeeps still exist, still have loans against them, and now have less work. The same applies to rooms that were built, guides who trained, and cooks who were hired.
The number a place can hold is set by the place, and in a protected area it is set by people whose job is to study it. It is not set by a company's marketing.
Where a limit is real, follow it strictly. Where it is invented in order to look careful, it is a cost passed to the people who live there so that a company can describe itself well.
This is worth separating from crowding, which is a genuine problem in plenty of places. Crowding is about total numbers over a season, and it is fixed by the authority that manages the site. One company taking fewer people does not reduce the total. It only changes which local business earns from it.
There is a second version of this worth naming. Some places genuinely should not be entered by outsiders at all, and no group size fixes that. A village rite changes the moment a stranger stands at the edge of it, and several of the festivals I have written about are like this. The right answer there is not a smaller group. It is not going, and saying why.
Which of these matters depends on what is actually in your plan. Somebody going to photograph birds needs a different question from somebody going to a craft village, and most journeys raise one or two of the five rather than all of them. None of them are clever. Each is something a planner has already decided, put back to them in plain words.
This one matters if there is a dance, a craft demonstration or some music anywhere on the itinerary. Ask where it takes place.
A performance in a hotel courtyard and a visit to the place where those people live and work are two very different things. In the first, the venue sets the price, keeps most of it and passes a small share down. The performers arrive, perform, and go home. In the second, you go to where the work actually happens, and you can put the money into the hands of the people who did it.
This is not an argument for stopping the hotel shows. People earn from them and that matters. It is a question about whether the itinerary ever goes to the other place, and whether anything you pay reaches anybody without a margin taken out of it first.
This one only comes up if a night is spent outdoors. A homestay, a small local hotel, a resort, all of them are fine, and which one appears depends on budget and on what the destination has. That part is not the issue.
The issue is whether any night is spent camping somewhere that is not a designated site. Undesignated camping is where the trash stays, where the fire ring stays and where the tyre marks stay. Nobody clears it, because nobody was supposed to be there. Ask whether it happens, and ask who cleans up if it does.
This one is worth asking about any activity that could just as easily have been run in another state. Ask whether it belongs to this place, or whether it is a product that a company from somewhere else sells in every destination it works in.
There is a version of adventure travel that runs the same activities in state after state, with the same equipment and the same script. None of it has anything to do with where you are standing. You can enjoy it, and it is not the place.
Ask what is on the itinerary that could not be run anywhere else.
This applies whenever a living thing is part of the day. An animal being ridden is the obvious one, and the answer is usually short.
The one people miss is fishing. A stream inside a forest holds a limited number of fish, and they are already spoken for. Otters eat them. Kingfishers and storks eat them. Households nearby have taken them for as long as anyone remembers.
When those fish become a paid activity, something that belonged to a whole system starts being sold to whoever turns up with money. Ask what is being caught, and out of what.
This one is for anybody travelling to photograph wildlife, and it is the question almost nobody thinks to ask. A picture of a bird at its nest is one of the most wanted images there is, and a clean one usually needs something done first. Branches get cut or tied back so the view is clear. That gives a crow, a snake or a raptor the same clear view, and lets sun onto eggs that were shaded for a reason. People come back because the light was wrong the first time, and each approach keeps a parent off the nest while chicks that feed many times an hour go without.
From there the practices run along a line, from waiting less to interfering more. A recorded call played on a speaker brings a territorial bird straight in, because it believes a rival has arrived. A nesting bird will leave the nest to fight something that is not there. Food put out to draw an animal into frame teaches it to come towards people, and that habit rarely ends well for the animal. At the far end is handling. A butterfly cooled until it is slow enough to photograph is then an insect that cannot fly properly, sitting in the open, in front of everything that eats insects.
Nobody involved feels they are doing harm. Everybody is quiet and careful, and none of this appears on an itinerary. It appears as a few hours at a good spot, with a guide who knows where things are.
So ask what the guide is going to do to make the shot happen. If the answer is wait, that is the right answer.
Some journeys raise one of those. Some raise three. A short trip to sit in one village and eat with a family may raise none at all, and that is a good sign rather than a gap.
Whichever ones fit your plan, you can put them to us, which is why they are written down. If the answers are vague, that is an answer. If a company can tell you where each thing happens, who receives the money, and what could not be run anywhere else, they have thought about the journey. If they can only say they are committed to responsible travel, they have thought about the sentence.
A refusal carries further than it looks, and this is worth understanding before you decline anything.
Saying no to riding an animal does not only spare that animal. It is one more entry in the demand figures that eventually decide what operators put on sale. Forest departments set most of the rules, and they move faster when the paying interest has already shifted.
Saying no to fishing in a forest stream does something less obvious. It refuses the idea that whatever sits inside a forest is available to be sold. The fish are not a facility. They belong to the birds, the animals and the people who live there, and there are only so many of them. A resource that belongs to a system gets spent, and spending it on somebody's entertainment takes it out of somewhere that needed it.
There is a limit to how far asking gets you, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
A person can only ask about things they can imagine, and can only see what somebody chose to put on the itinerary. Nobody books a photography trip while wondering whether a guide will cut branches away from a nest. You would have to already know the practice exists, and know why it matters, before the question could occur to you.
Knowledge does not spread evenly and nobody holds all of it. Anyone booking a journey is choosing from what is on offer, and what is on offer was decided by somebody else. A person buys what exists. They cannot be expected to know what a thing turns into after they have gone home.
That is the operator's subject, not the traveller's. Knowing what a practice does is the job, and it is most of what an operator is for.
So the real test is not whether a traveller asked a good question. It is whether the thing that should not have been offered was ever on the list. An inventory is a set of decisions about what is acceptable, taken before anybody asks. A company that stops doing something only when a customer objects was selling it right up until that day.
None of this needs a certificate or a badge. It needs somebody willing to say what is in the plan and why.
What we call this way of planning is care-based travel, and the name matters far less than the arrangement behind it. The decisions get made early, by the people who have the power to make them, so that a traveller can arrive and simply pay attention.
In common use it means travelling so that local people gain and places and wildlife are not harmed. The term was coined in 2000 with a definition, criteria and a screening process behind it, but the word spread much faster than the method. Most companies using it now are not being checked against anything. The useful test is whether a company can tell you what is in the plan and who gets paid for it.
They overlap and they are not identical. Sustainable travel usually focuses on what a journey costs a place in water, fuel, waste and emissions. Ecotourism usually means travel built around wild places and looking after them. Responsible travel is broader and covers the social and economic side as well, including who earns from the journey.
Not on their own, and sometimes the opposite. The number of people a place can hold is set by the place. In a protected area the forest department works it out and sets it. Taking a much smaller group than the place can host does not protect it, it reduces the work available to the local drivers, guides and hosts who are already there.
Pick the questions that fit what is actually on your itinerary. If there is a performance, ask where it happens and who is handed the money. If a night is outdoors, ask who clears up. If wildlife photography is involved, ask what the guide will do to make the shot happen. A company that has thought about the journey can answer specifically, and one that answers with a general commitment has thought about the phrasing.
Not necessarily, because most of it is substitution rather than addition. Lunch in a home instead of a restaurant takes the same slot and often the same money. So does an hour with a local storyteller instead of a ticket. What changes is where the money lands.
No, and any company promising a fixed proportion of these is either not being straight with you or turning customers away. Some destinations have no homestay at all, and a plan has to work within what exists and within what the traveller actually needs. The type of accommodation is a much weaker signal than what fills the days.
Riding an animal for a safari is worth avoiding, and a jeep is the usual alternative where one is available. A jeep burns fuel, so this is a trade rather than a clean improvement. Forest departments set most of these rules, and what visitors consistently ask for tends to move the practice faster than regulation does.
The photograph is not the problem, the method usually is. Clearing branches for a clear view also gives predators a clear view and lets sun onto eggs that were shaded. Repeated approaches keep a parent away from chicks that need feeding many times an hour. Playing a recorded call to draw a bird in makes it defend a territory against a rival that does not exist, and pulls it off the nest to do so.
Parts of it can. You can say who was paid, how, and for what, and you can say who set the limits on numbers and access. Broader claims about benefit and impact are much harder to verify and are usually asserted rather than shown. A specific answer about a specific itinerary is worth more than a policy page.
Both, but not equally, and not at the same point. The company chooses the route, the stays, the transport and the activities, usually weeks before the traveller sees any of it. The traveller controls their own behaviour once they arrive, which matters, but it is the smaller share of the outcome.