2023 Impact Report

Our Impact Report, 2023

Our Values

Our Founder, Henry Morley, started True Travel in 2013 with the mission to enrich lives and create lifelong memories through authentic tailor-made travels whilst always remaining mindful of the world around us.

When we opened our doors in 2013, we laid out a set of values, and today they are more important to us than ever. Travelling with a positive impact has always been a fundamental part of our founding values, and in 2016, we cemented our commitment to sustainable and conscious travel and founded the True Travel Foundation with the aim of supporting vital grassroots projects around the world.

We want to utilise our position as a leader in travel to make the world a better place in a way that is clear, impactful, and achievable. Travel should help everyone explore our world in a way that benefits both the visitor and those being visited; it is this sentiment that lies at the core of our Foundation and drives us to pioneer positive impact in travel.

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As I reflect on our remarkable journey over the past year, I am proud to share with you our 2023 Impact Report. This year was incredibly special for us as a team as it marked True Travel’s 10th Birthday. Moreover, it stands as a groundbreaking year for our Foundation where we achieved milestones that not only set new standards but also solidified our commitment to pioneering positive impact travel. In 2023, we set ambitious targets and soared to new heights, and I am delighted to share what we achieved in this year’s report. We attained B Corp Certification, placing us in just 3.5% of all applicants; we successfully transitioned our Foundation into a dedicated charitable entity; and finally, we raised a magnificent £80,000 for our Foundation to support our two community charity partners in Zambia & India, and our Blue Carbon partner, Seawilding - a 640% increase in funds raised in house by the True Travel team.

Looking ahead to 2024, our dedication to continuous improvement remains steadfast. These achievements not only reflect our commitment to instigating genuine positive change and making a tangible difference, but more importantly, pave the way for even greater strides in the years to come. An example, that I hope other tour operators in the travel world will decide to follow.

To our clients who choose purposeful travel, our partners who share our vision, and our team whose dedication fuels our shared commitment – thank you for your continued support and trust. No business is perfect, but here you will find an overview of what we have achieved in 2023 and our goals for improvement moving forwards in 2024.

Henry Morley, Founder & CEO

2023 Impact Snapshot

3 Project partners

173

Tonnes of C02 balanced

£3,000 Invested in social causes

£80,000 Raised for our project partners

Visit the True Travel Foundation website at www.truetravelfoundation.com to learn more.

Our 2023 Goals

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Measure and offset all our Scope 1 and 2 emissions in addition to the Scope 3 emissions that we already offset.

• •

Become a Certified B Corp by the end of the year.

Research and set our viable Net Zero target and create a timeline plan.

We are still in the process of establishing our Net Zero strategy. We are taking steps to understand our entire footprint as a business, calculate a baseline, and develop a personalised action plan to effectively eliminate our carbon emissions. This will be our key target and primary focus in 2024.

What We Achieved in 2023

We measured and offset all of our Scope 1 and 2 emissions in addition to the Scope 3 emissions that we already offset. Learn more about our carbon offsetting schemes on page 20.

We became B Corp Certified in August 2023 after an 8 month rigorous assessment period. For more information on what B Corp Certification means for you as well as our company, please visit page 9.

Transitioned our Foundation into an independant charitable entity (Registered Charity Number: 1099682) under the auspices of Prism the Gift Fund. Learn more about our charitable status on page 12.

The young boys of the Taabar Shelter receiving their rucksacks as part of The Rucksack Project in Jaipur, India

The young girls of The Female Empowerment Programme during their theatre group performance in South Luangwa, Zambia

Head of Europe, Molly, filtering seagrass seeds at the Seawilding HQ in Loch Craignish, Scotland

B Corp

At the start of the year, we commenced on our journey to attain B Corp Certification, and it is with immense excitement that after eight months of rigorous assessments, we proudly became B Corp Certified in August 2023 - against a success rate of just 3.5%. Becoming a certified B Corporation demonstrates that we have met the highest standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. We are now just 1 of 19 travel companies in the UK to be awarded this prestigious status.

This has formalised our responsibility to the environment through the legal framework which ensures we remain committed to our founding values and hold ourselves accountable for the planet, people, and future generations to come.

B Corp is an amazing tool to recognise that there is so much more we can do. The certification process confirmed that we are already operating our business to high standards from a social, environmental and governance perspective. However, it has also enabled us to identify not only our strengths as a company but also our weaknesses and where we need to improve, which we can now start focusing on. Certified B Corps are required to go through a recertification process every three years in order to retain their status, and our aim is to improve on our overall score of 83.8 in the next three years.

We firmly believe that travel can and should be a force for good, and this certification further strengthens our determination to become a flag bearer for positive impact travel. B Corp Certification is a journey, not a destination. Making your business a force for good – and ensuring it stays that way – means constantly working to improve your practices. That is why we are committed to a journey of continuous improvement and will keep pushing forward, identifying more ways to support our workers, suppliers, the planet and its people.

Impact Score

18.3/25 Governance

34.3/50 Workers

16.7/42 Community

10.7/20 Environment

3.5/5 Customers

Our B Corp score is assessed across 5 key categories. Visit the True Travel B Corp Page at bcorporation.net to learn more.

Charitable Status

In a world where the preservation of our planet is more crucial than ever, we are delighted to announce the official launch of the True Travel Foundation as a dedicated charitable entity. For the past seven years, the True Travel Foundation has been the driving force behind our commitment to protect and preserve both the natural world and the diverse cultures that make our planet extraordinary. Now, as a restricted fund operating under the auspices of Prism the Gift Fund (Registered Charity Number: 1099682), our foundation is positioned to embark on an even more profound journey, dedicated to creating a meaningful and lasting impact on local communities and conservation initiatives around the world.

This marks a significant expansion of our impact and underscores our mission to ensure that the funds we raise make an actual difference to those in need. We are truly excited to extend our reach globally and share the remarkable stories of our projects with a wider audience.

As a result of this exciting chapter, we are thrilled to share our new Foundation website. Here you can discover more about the incredible projects we support, our commitment to positive impact travel, and our latest news. Donations can now be made through the True Travel Foundation’s Collective Fund, offering the added benefit of Gift Aid, or directly through True Travel.

Designing our Foundation Logo

In our journey towards establishing our foundation as an independent charitable entity, we acknowledged the importance of refining our image and mission while staying true to our core values. Therefore, when designing our new logo, we thoughtfully adapted our existing emblem to embody our foundation’s ethos and objectives, reflecting our reinvigorated identity and purpose.

The turtle symbolises our foundation’s unwavering commitment to conservation. Since the Foundation was established, we have supported vital projects at the forefront of conservation and environmental protection. We want to ensure that our planet’s wildlife and wild places are protected and preserved for generations to come.

The seagrass signifies our blue carbon partnership with Seawilding and our dedication to the restoration and protection of our oceans. Seagrass, often overlooked but critically important, serves as a cornerstone in marine ecosystems.

The lotus flower represents regeneration, growth and positive change. Our journey is one of continuous improvement and each step we take contributes to the safeguarding of our planet’s future.

Explore our New Foundation Website

Seawilding

Seawilding, our blue carbon offset partner, is a pioneering community-led native oyster and seagrass restoration programme based at Loch Craignish, Scotland. Collaborating closely with coastal communities, their aim is to restore degraded inshore marine habitats to enhance biodiversity, sequester carbon, and create green jobs. This partnership has enabled us to offset all of our clients and company’s carbon emissions.

Seawilding’s flagship projects, aimed at restoring 1 million native oysters and 80 hectares of seagrass meadows in Loch Craignish, are the first of their kind in the UK. They are pioneering best-practice, cost-effective marine habitat restoration methodologies, while providing open source guides for other coastal research projects worldwide in order to help them do the same.

Together with Weatherbys Bank, we marked this partnership with an opening donation of £25,000 in June 2022. This funding specifically supported the training of four divers in seagrass replanting, resulting in a significant 40% reduction in reseeding costs.

We are thrilled to share that our donation has played a pivotal role in driving substantial progress this year. Through our support, the four divers secured advanced diving qualifications, enabling them to undergo specialised training for scientific diving and acquire all necessary equipment. This development has significantly enhanced their ability to survey the seabed at Loch Craignish, advance their native oyster and seagrass restoration projects, and deliver marine habitat restoration at scale.

This year marked a significant milestone for Seawilding as they received a licence from NatureScot to trial a groundbreaking technique never seen before in the UK: the transplantation of rhizomes. This remarkable opportunity not only underscores Seawilding’s expertise and pioneering approach, but it also marks a significant milestone in marine conservation. Seawilding is now fully relying on their in-house divers, whom we sponsored, to deliver this groundbreaking methodology. We are very excited to continue sharing the progress of this initiative over the next few months.

In 2023, Seawilding successfully planted 10,000 seagrass rhizomes, 300,000 seagrass seeds, and restored 350,000 native oysters to the sea bed in Loch Craignish. In 2024, they plan to significantly expand on these efforts, aiming to replant acres of seagrass meadows and reintroduce millions of native oysters.

This year, we raised an incredible £60,000 for Seawilding. This donation will play a crucial role in funding Seawilding’s core operational costs, project delivery, and the research and expansion of their native oyster and seagrass programmes.

Danny Renton, Seawilding CEO, shares, “The award of this grant from True Travel to help further our seagrass and native oyster restoration research is vital if we are to restore these important marine habitats at scale. Seawilding’s community based efforts are inspiring others to do the same, and this kind of support from True Travel is invaluable in our efforts to address ocean biodiversity decline and the growing impact of climate change”.

4

£60,000 Seawilding team members fully qualified to carry out scientific diving directly from our donation in 2022.

Donated to Seawilding in 2023 to enable their team to continue researching, developing and expanding their native oyster and seagrass restoration programmes.

The Female Empowerment Programme

The Female Empowerment Programme offers extra support to young girls in rural Zambia through academic workshops, extracurricular opportunities and empowering education. Their mission is to inspire young girls to believe in their self-worth and build on their self-esteem, literacy and overall academic performance.

In 2015, the programme established a Girl’s Club at Yosefe Primary School, creating a safe environment for girls to explore different ideas outside of their normal classroom environment. Between 2016 and 2023, we have raised £17,300 and with that, fully funded 46 young girls to join The Female Empowerment Programme.

Additionally, our donations enabled the programme to double the number of girls they were able to teach, leading to the division of Yosefe Club into two distinct groups based on the girls’ age. The next club was subsequently formed at the Matula Primary School, introducing girls to a variety of different career options for women, exposing them to successful local female entrepreneurs, and conducting sessions on relationships, menstruation and sexuality.

Earlier this year, The Female Empowerment Programme introduced a Zambian-built digital literacy app to assist in the progression of the girls’ English literacy and language skills. The app was piloted at one of the girls’ clubs in Mfuwe, where literacy levels are very low, and it recorded the girls’ English levels advancing at three times the pace of last year.

This data is extremely encouraging and has helped address the immense challenges facing teachers in primary schools in rural Africa. They are now extending the app across the other girls’ clubs in Zambia to enhance their current English literacy support programmes by providing high-quality interactive resources to make it easier for teachers to deliver engaging lessons that children will enjoy.

We are incredibly proud to have raised £10,000 for The Female Empowerment Programme in 2023. This donation will fully fund 20 new girls to join the 2024 cohort at Matula Girls Club and complete the three year programme.

46

Girls fully funded to join The Female Empowerment Programme to date.

£10,000

Donated to The Female Empowerment Programme in 2023 to fully support 20 new girls to join the 2024 cohort.

The Rucksack Project

The Rucksack Project in Jaipur, India is a collaboration with Taabar Shelter, an NGO that works specifically with boys. These are boys from all over India who have got lost, run away or been forced into child labour. The shelter does incredible work to rehabilitate the boys, re-build their confidence, teach them basic English, Maths and Hindi and ultimately find their families.

The True Travel Foundation financially supports The Rucksack Project and provides the boys in the shelter with essential and educational resources. It costs £8 to provide one child with a rucksack. With each donation a rucksack will be provided to a child in the shelter, something that he can call his own and something that when the time comes he can take home.

Between 2016 and 2023, we have donated £16,735 to support the Taabar Shelter and The Rucksack Project. Through these donations, 1,114 children in Jaipur have been provided with rucksacks filled with essential resources directly from our funding. Furthermore, our donations enabled The Rucksack Project to organise workshops, creative activities, and counselling sessions to promote the boys’ emotional wellbeing and build a sense of belonging.

We are also extremely proud to have raised £10,000 for the Rucksack Project in 2023. This donation will not only provide rucksacks but also fully fund 300 boys in the shelter with essential resources, school uniforms, counselling sessions, medical prescriptions and local transport, ensuring their wellbeing for an entire year.

1,114

£10,000 Boys at The Rucksack Project provided with essential and educational resources to date.

Donated to The Rucksack Project in 2023 in order to fully fund 300 boys in the shelter with essential provisions for the entire year.

Carbon Footprint & Offsetting Schemes

This section of our Impact Report highlights how we are minimising the carbon footprint of True Travel and the initiatives we have implemented in order to actively address climate change and be part of the solution.

To calculate the carbon footprint of our clients’ trips, we use an accurate and trusted calculator provided by Sustainable Travel International. Emissions are calculated based on a standard, region-specific itinerary, tailored to the departing destination, number of travellers, and length of stay. We then offer our clients the opportunity to wholly offset their carbon emissions, through our blue carbon partner, Seawilding.

We are thrilled that over 50% of our clients actively choose to offset the carbon emissions generated from their trips, contributing to a groundbreaking initiative that is paving the way for blue carbon projects across the world. Additionally, we measure and offset all of our team’s carbon footprint for all of their work/business and personal travel as well as their commuting emissions. We agreed that we would measure our total carbon footprint for the year, and then double the offset. Last year, we produced 86.5 tonnes of C02, therefore, we have offset 173 tonnes of C02 through donations to Seawilding.

We acknowledge that offsetting alone is not the solution for the issue of carbon. However, in conjuction with a policy of measurement, reduction and adaptation, it’s an important part of the solution. Every business has a carbon footprint, and it is our collective responsibility to be mindful of this and work towards reducing it as much as possible. Our initiatives include investing in innovative blue carbon projects, establishing a Net Zero target, and maintaining our commitment to keep our Scope 1 and 2 emissions at zero.

Social Impact

As we look to the future of travel, we want to find solutions; not simply to help our clients offset their carbon emissions from their travels, but to go further and ensure that all our travel experiences leave a positive and lasting impact on the destination we love.

Working with a global network of local guide specialists to ensure genuinely authentic experiences, and partnering with independently and locally run businesses, we strive to work with suppliers who clearly demonstrate their support in giving back to their local economies, communities and environmental causes.

One of our main aims this year is to collect more reliable social and environmental performance data within our supply chain, to demonstrate more clearly the environmental and social impact we create as a business.

Our Contributions

Africa is a region where we already have transparent data. Wherever possible, we demonstrate in each of our clients bookings how much their trip is helping to support community and conservation projects and initiatives. Here is a breakdown of our contributions in Africa and how we have helped support each destination’s environmental, social and conservation causes for 2023. These figures are based on park and conservation fees donated.

In addition...

In February, the team at True Travel made a donation of £2,000 to the Choose Love Organisation to support their on-the-ground efforts in response to the humanitarian crisis following the Turkey/Syria earthquake. This donation directly assisted their partners in the field in rescuing any survivors and providing emergency medical care, food, and shelter.

Team Donations

At the start of 2023, we introduced a quarterly incentive to keep our travel designers engaged with the Foundation in the way they curate itineraries for positive impact travel. At the end of each quarter, the most engaged travel designer was rewarded with a £250 donation to the charity of their choice. Learn more about where their donations made an impact below:

1. Head of Europe, Molly Kinnaird, donated £250 to the Care 4 Calais Organisation to help deliver emergency aid to refugees in Calais and areas affected by the European migrant crisis. Molly shares, “I chose Care 4 Calais because I have seen first hand how essential the money is to keep the charity’s mission of helping refugees and delivering aid to those affected by the migrant crisis”.

2. Global Sales Director, Pete Trangmar, decided to divide his donation between two charities close to his heart. He donated £125 to the Bob Willis Fund and £125 to Havens Hospice.

3. Senior Africa Specialist, Peter Felix, directed his £250 donation to the Uthando Organisation based in South Africa. He shares, “The variety of projects that they support means that all money is incredibly well spent and 100% of the donations go to the projects. They do amazing work in some very difficult parts of Cape Town and it is very noticeable about the difference that they are making in the community”.

4. European Travel Designer, Emily Beor-Roberts, donated £250 to The Carlie Tuffnell Charitable Trust to support the preservation of mental health, advance the education of individuals with dyslexia or any other related specific learning disability, and facilitate participation in the arts, culture, and hertiage.

Some of the True Travel team during their visit in September 2022 to Seawilding’s HQ on the west coast of Scotland, alongside Seawilding Founder, Danny (far right) and Project Manager, Will (far left)

Key Targets for 2024

To implement a Supplier Code of Conduct within our supply chain, outlining the ethical and operational standards expected from our suppliers in alignment with our values and principles.

In addition, we plan to collect more reliable social and environmental data within our supply chain.

Research our viable Net Zero strategy and establish a baseline to effectively reduce our carbon emissions.

Keep our Scope 1 and 2 emissions at zero and remove our Scope 3 emissions as much as possible.

Send 100% of our team on volunteering days supporting projects that have a real impact.

Improve on our overall B Corp score of 83.8.

Raise £100,000 for our Foundation.

To Conclude

Writing this report has been immensely valuable for us as a business. It has supported us in identifying areas requiring improvement, challenged us to think deeply about the kind of business we strive to be, and has allowed us to recognise and celebrate the positive changes we continue to make.

Raising £10,000 for each of our community projects is a significant achievement, and our overall donation of £80,000 represents a remarkable 640% increase from last year’s contributions. Our impact is not something that will ever stand still. It is an integral part of how we work and will always adapt and evolve. It’s also a conversation that involves experts, partners, and other companies, all of whom support and challenge us as we explore what our business can do to positively impact people and the planet.

We know we are far from perfect, and there is still a long journey ahead, but we are incredibly proud of the progress we have made over the past year to ensure sustainability runs through every layer of our business. For companies such as ours and others in the industry, working together and taking action holistically is key to making real progress. That is why we are committed to fulfilling our promises and ensuring openness, honesty and transparency in all that we do.

Joining the B Corp community will allow us to collaborate and communicate with like-minded businesses in all corners of the world and we are excited to be in a position to continue pioneering positive impact in travel and encourage others to do the same. We will always strive to do more, but we hope that by continuing to be transparent in our Impact Reports, we can further account for our impact and lead the way in creating a more regenerative future in travel.

If you would like to learn more about the True Travel Foundation, or to donate, please do get in touch with a member of our team on foundation@true.travel.

The Art of Travel Why True Travel?

Specialist

Our unparalleled expertise comes from extensive, first-hand experience in our specialist destinations, alongside decades of hands-on travel curation.

Conscious

Being mindful of the world around us. Always considering the impact of every itinerary and ensuring conscious travel is front of mind.

Curated

Each itinerary starts with a blank canvas, guaranteeing a truly unique experience that is hand-crafted in every detail.

Independent

Ensuring inherently authentic experiences, guided by our autonomy and independence.

Curious

A shared wonder and insatiable desire to discover everything the world has to offer. We are infinitely curious.

Donate to the True Travel Foundation

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