We are on a mission – we believe in the power of tourism to do good. We wanted to empower local communities by bringing them to market, and to tap into the move online for booking travel, so we set up Much Better Adventures. One of my co-founders, Alex, worked for an eco-lodge in Ecuador for a summer and noticed how old-hat it was, how they couldn't reach the market they needed because they didn't have the knowledge or finances to compete online. In the end, they had to sell their land to loggers because they couldn't get enough international tourists. And I used to work for a charity that used sustainable tourism to fund projects for communities in Sarawak, to try and avoid turning to palm oil production. But it was all offline, handing out pamphlets, and anyone with Marketing 101 knows that's not scalable.
Tourism can be a problematic industry. For example, there are cruise liners that go to Scandinavia, which used to hire local guides to take passengers on day trips. But the liners got their staff to learn the routes and take passengers on the tours themselves instead, meaning the money which should have been dripping into the local economy was gone. And on a foreign holiday booking, some studies have shown that up to 80 per cent of the revenue generated from tourism can stay in the country where the booking was made – not the destination visited. And we don't agree with that model. Our idea is that we reverse that, so we have a fairer commission for our suppliers and the customer still gets the best rate. Local people get better bookings because it's easier to reach the customers they need to reach – everybody wins.
Look around London and it's full of people who are time-poor, experience-hungry and cash-rich. So we thought of a proposition where you could do something completely unique, like packrafting through Finnish forests in a weekend, taking half a day off work to do that. If you wanted to, you could make every single weekend really interesting and still have time off work to have a proper, long holiday.
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If you broke down the trips we offer into all the stages and booked each part yourself and brought all the equipment, it would be so complicated and that's what makes people think 'I'd love to go and do that', but they don't because it's an effort. Or if they're doing it with a group of friends, the faff factor comes into play big time. Things like organising the camping gear, trying to find out who has everything, perhaps it's at their mum's house, and then the trip is off because it doesn't come together. So, with us, suddenly there's everything in one – airport transfer, tent, kayak, end price and an easy book button. We make people's bucket list items bookable, as easily as a hotel room.
We believe that over the next century, the trend for consumerism will go towards experiences, not things. So many of us are doing things, which we are then displaying on social media – and these things reflect our values and choices. You're saying to yourself and others that you are interesting, you want to do new exciting things, challenge yourself. People want to be better versions of themselves, and travel ticks that box. We're based on the edge of the City of London, and if you think about the people there, many of them just need a break from this type of environment. Going to another big city for people who already commute, who already travel to other cities for work, to then commute around another one to visit tourist attractions doesn't seem like much of a holiday. And when you think about travel, do you really want to be by a swimming pool with everyone else? Probably not, it's a bit boring and one pool is like another. We've got things like kayaking up the Norwegian fjords and it's poetic, there's a pull.
We're very aware that people flying around the world for these trips isn't great for the environment. But people will always fly, that isn't stopping, so we want to make travel better and more sustainable in other ways. We have a foundation, where we pledge a pound for every new customer. At the moment we are collecting, and in the long run, we'd like it to be an NGO that helps sustain national parks and environmental projects that relate to the places we go. We want to give a voice to activists who are fighting the good fight and trying to protect their parks. For example, many national parks in Eastern Europe recently lost their status, which leaves them open to being violated and completely ruined. We really believe that tourism can help keep those places alive and sustained. We've got an eye on how we can use our business to keep national parks open and keep jobs in their areas.
SAM BRUCE is co-founder of sustainable adventure travel start-up, Much Better Adventures with Guy Bowden and Alex Narracott; muchbetteradventures.com
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