These women-led travel firms promote eco-conscious, ethical tourism

Nine years ago, Prerna Prasad came across a captivating mud-house built by environmentalists and architects Revathi Sekhar Kamath and Vasanth Kamath in Surajkund, near New Delhi. “The moment I saw Van Bhoj from the entry gate, I fell in love with it,” she narrates.

Today, as the founder of eco-conscious tourism platform Ecoplore, Prerna has acquired and promotes Van Bhoj as a sustainable living space open for day visits where guests can experience the “art and benefits of a sustainable lifestyle”.

Van Bhoj, with its cool, maintenance-free rustic vibe, is only one of the properties that Prerna, a former journalist based in Delhi, promotes through Ecoplore. Her platform is riding on the new wave of eco-tourism or ethical tourism that is emerging in India. This burgeoning niche not only caters to the affluent but also appeals to those who prioritise sustainability, cultural authenticity and social responsibility.

“Metro cities are becoming more polluted and crowded. At the same time, people have more spending power and want to go to places that are closer to nature,” says Prerna, who personally visited over 200 eco-friendly hotels around India before adding them to her platform.

Comfort and eco-consciousness

The Ecoplore team ranks hotels on factors such as comfort, hygiene and safety, besides on their environmental-friendly and ethical practices and construction.

“We have two main criteria for the hotels we promote,” says Prerna. “First, they need to be made of mud, wood, bamboo, stone or any other locally sourced material, or else they could be heritage buildings. Second, at least one-third of the total campus of the hotel should be green with a large number of trees.”

Prerna’s team also looks out for other criteria like rainwater harvesting, composting, solar energy panels, growing organic vegetables, and so on. Most hotels on the platform are plastic-free zones and visitors are encouraged to carry their plastic waste back to the cities.

Unavoidable waste like grocery packaging is sent to NGOs like Ecokaari, which makes functional accessories out of plastic waste.

Ethical luxury tourism

While there is a growing awareness among travellers about the environmental impacts of their travel choices, a niche group of tourists also seeks to make a positive social impact on the destinations they visit. Here comes the concept of ethical luxury tourism. It involves high-end travel experiences that are environmentally sustainable, culturally respectful, and socially responsible.

This type of tourism seeks to minimise the negative impacts of travel while maximising the positive contributions to local communities and ecosystems. Travellers opting for ethical luxury tourism are not just looking for opulence or comfort but also meaningful and transformative experiences.

Catering to this audience is TealFeel, a conscious luxury travel service in Mumbai cofounded by Karen Mulla and Mallika Sheth. “We believe it’s about being proactive and spreading the message of positive change,” says Karen. “We work with partners – hotels, lodges, and local vendors – who are doing conservation and environmental preservation work, and bring that information to our clients ahead of their trips. This knowledge ensures a more engaged traveller.”

Many of these ‘green hotels’ invest money on sustainability basics such as incorporating waste management measures, focusing on local supply chains, reduction of imports and water conservation.

They also focus on “rewiring business processes and infrastructure to ensure that environmental preservation is not just a box they’ve ticked as part of a strategy but a model on which they’re rebuilding their businesses,” says Karen.

TealFeel largely caters to luxury travellers heading to destinations abroad, “from those beginning their explorations with the bucket-list favourites of Paris, Switzerland and Italy to those who have traversed the world and are now looking for unique experiences and memorable adventures,” says Mallika.

While all are in the luxury segment, Mallika says, the latter group is more aware of sustainability, eager to learn about wildlife conservation, environmental preservation and also more focused on their own personal wellness.

“Our key influencers in the travel space are kids. Today, schools educate kids on climate change, recycling, waste management and noise pollution, amongst other sustainability pillars,” says Mallika. “Therefore, when we take families to hotels that do these and a whole lot more, kids tend to be a lot more interested and engaged during their holiday.”

Challenges ahead

Even so, the fact remains that eco-tourism is a niche market. “The chunk of Indian travellers are still budget travellers, and places that promote sustainable tourism don’t come cheap,” says Ritu Goyal Harish, Pune-based founder of Ease India Travel, which curates off-beat travel itineraries across India.

She gives the example of mud-houses in Kerala. “They don’t have air conditioning because the walls remain cool even in summers. But it costs almost double of what you’d pay for a three-star hotel to stay in a mud-house because of the investment and labour required to maintain it,” she says.

Further, she says, many offbeat destinations are cut-off from the mainland and urban centres. “As it is, they have a resource crunch and they don’t have very many luxurious facilities to offer guests. They try to be eco-conscious in their own ways.”

She gives the example of a homestay in Kaziranga, Assam, that does not offer bottled water in rooms so that guests are encouraged to bring their own bottles, thus reducing plastic waste.

But it’s an uphill battle.

“Travel by air or car is by its very nature bad for the environment. There’s a high carbon footprint,” she says. “My fear as a travel company for the future of eco-travel is that, as the spending capacity of Indians goes up, there are more people opting for extravagant holidays than a decade ago.”

Ritu explains that as travellers move from budget travel to premium and then to luxury travel, they begin looking for more and more comfort and extravagance. They finally reach a stage where they say, “I can afford to stay in an expensive property and soak in a tub twice a day and use disposable bottles of water and shampoos.” That’s a problem, she says.

“If you have a tub in every room of the hotel, that’s a lot of clean, treated water being wasted. No guest wants to go out of their way to avoid wasteful travel practices while on holiday,” says Ritu. “It’s a tough call for the travel industry to balance out.”

Tips to stay eco-friendly on your travels

Ritu and her team at Ease India Travel have come up with simple tips for their clients to promote sustainable tourism. “These tips are often met with a lot of resistance. But I believe every little drop counts. Every action matters,” she asserts.

1. Carry a refillable bottle: Avoid buying plastic bottles. As an individual, if you carry a refillable bottle, you are saving 10 plastic bottles on a five-day trip, says Ritu.
2. Avoid carrying shampoo sachets: This plastic waste is not easily disposable especially in offbeat, rural destinations that don’t have recycling plants or proper garbage disposal systems.
3. Take shorter showers: Yes, you are on a holiday and don’t want to be bothered about such things, but be conscious of the lack of freshwater resources in our world.
4. Bring your own shopping bag: Take along a canvas tote or cloth bag so that you don’t have to take your shopping home in plastic bags.
5. Avoid using disposables: Even if these disposable plates, glasses and spoons are of the eco-friendly kind, people in small villages don’t know how to get rid of such garbage. They may end up burning it or dumping it along hillsides.
6. Avoid wet wipes: Commercial wet wipes are not environment-friendly. Ritu began offering guests wet wipes made of bamboo on treks – because you can’t shower for many days – but these too come in plastic packaging, so some amount of nonbiodegradable waste is generated nonetheless.

Ultimately, we need to redefine luxury in this new age of sustainability. As Mallika puts it, “It also means sensitivity to locally accessible resources, access to untrodden paths without hurting the local ecosystem, and an overall awareness of conscious consumption while living in comfort.” It requires a paradigm shift in the way we perceive travel.