Fair Trails® – Travel for a better world!

One of my favorite quotes about travel comes from Mark Twain and reads: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people are in dire need of it for these reasons. Broad, edifying, charitable views of people and the world cannot be acquired by vegetating in a small corner of the earth all one’s life.” But hasn’t this quote, which dates back to the late 19th century, lost its validity in the meantime? In a present in which resource-guzzling mass tourism has long since replaced travel. And the globe is in the stranglehold of the climate crisis, partly because of rampant mobility?

Wouldn’t it be best to reflect and limit yourself? To refrain from traveling as much as possible? Anyone who expected a broad change in awareness now, at the end of such a devastating pandemic that has given international tourism an involuntary reprieve and in view of the far-reaching global climate goals set by the UN, the European Union, etc., will wake up disillusioned or even hungover.

If, for example, even the venerable Lufthansa uses jumbo jets again after this Corona winter to bring the vacation masses to Mallorca, it must be noted that not much has changed from pre-Corona and pre-Greta times. Because the paper on which the many sustainability concepts for tourism are printed is not worth it, or at least patiently.

Endless expanses give the opportunity to give space to his thoughts ©Trail Angels/Matthew Nelson

Well then, how does a small company like Trail Angels, which since its inception has been dedicated to creating and spreading sustainable tourism, respond to this ever-widening gap between announcement and implementation? Especially since we have already proven in the past that sustainable tourism can work. That it can also be economically sustainable and thus relevant for often disadvantaged rural regions. As the Alpe-Adria Trail has proven. Or the Lynx Trail. Or the Amazon of Europe Bike Trail has triggered a new, transnational interaction.

We are therefore convinced that travel will continue to be important in the future. Meaningful for travelers, beneficial for travellers and appreciative for all involved. But this new way of traveling has to be part of the solution and not the problem. More sustainable, more ecological, fairer and more comprehensive.

We have been thinking about the “how” for a long time. And we joined forces as team players with fellow campaigners such as the impact specialists from Ennovent or the communications experts from Pilum to jointly develop the initiative “Fair Trails® – Travel for a Better World”. We were supported by the renowned Austrian Development Agency, which gave us the opportunity to put our model for a new, responsible tourism into practice. In selected destinations, on equal footing with great partners, from WWF to the Snow Leopard Conservancy to GHE in India.

Looking into the future, we can see numerous challenges that we want to overcome with our Fair Trails® model in order to be able to guarantee the development of sustainable tourism © Trail Angels/Matthew Nelson

It may sound presumptuous that we want to change the way we travel with Fair Trails®. But we are convinced that we can set an important impulse with our initiative. To do this, we work with a never-ending inspiration and enthusiasm for sustainable tourism. And now that Fair Trails® is becoming more and more real, we invite you to join us and participate. By traveling for a better world! Because that’s where a second favorite quote of mine comes in, this time from Robert Frost: “Two paths presented themselves to me. I took the road less traveled, and that made all the difference.”

Here it goes to the new Fair Trails® Explorer Touren.
On our Fair Trails® Home page you can sign up for the Fair Trails® newsletter to be kept up to date.

And in the next blog in this series, you’ll learn what sets Fair Trails® travel apart from so many “green washing” offerings, making it so unique.

Similar articles