Protecting wildlife protects people and jobs. By pledging to become a wildlife-friendly travel company you are showing your commitment to rebuilding a more responsible and resilient industry. An industry that understands that by not offering cruel and inhumane wild animal entertainment, you are protecting wildlife, people and the travel industry from future pandemics.
Travel companies all over the world are boldly making this commitment, moving away from selling and promoting captive wildlife entertainment, such as riding or bathing elephants, taking a tiger selfie, walking with lions, or swimming with dolphins.
Tracking the Travel Industry report: Learn how some of the world's leading travel companies are ranking on their public animal welfare commitments
You can work with World Animal Protection to help you transition towards a wildlife-friendly future by taking our wildlife-friendly pledge alongside other travel companies.
Download PDF: Wildlife Friendly Travel Companies
As a wildlife-friendly company, we:
- Believe tourism can be a force for good and can help keep wildlife wild. As a responsible travel company, we recognise the links between wildlife protection, human health, and a responsible and resilient travel industry.
- Understand the link between pandemics, like COVID-19, and wild animal exploitation, and that the relationship between tourism and wildlife needs to change for the good of people, world economies and animals.
- Recognise that building back the travel industry more resilient and more responsibly is vital. As we face unprecedented challenges and routes to recovery due to COVID-19, we want to be part of the solution for our business, our communities and for travellers.
- Understand that tourists love animals and want to experience them on holidays but are not aware that across the world hundreds of thousands of wild animals are held in captivity and subjected to mental and physical suffering and exploitation for experiences such as elephant rides, tiger selfies, walking with lions or swimming with dolphins.
As a wildlife-friendly company, we pledge to:
- Review our product offers to determine if we are supplying anything where wild animals are being used anywhere primarily for entertainment.
- Create a time-bound plan to help protect wild animals by influencing significant changes in supplier practices and / or phasing-out wildlife entertainment from our promotions and offers.
- Adopt an animal welfare policy for our business and share this policy with customers and staff.
- Provide our customers, if possible, with responsible wildlife offers where animals in the wild, at genuine sanctuaries or wildlife-friendly settings have the freedom and ability to exhibit a wide range of natural behaviours and tourists can observe them from a safe and respectful distance.
- Promote responsible tourism amongst our customers to enable them to be wildlife-friendly travellers and advocates.
View our growing list of worldwide wildlife-friendly travel companies
You can also work with others in the travel industry to drive industry standards and government legislation to better protect wildlife through tourism via the Coalition for Ethical Wildlife Tourism. This coalition drives industry standards and government legislation, protects wildlife and proves the demand for animal friendly tourism. Learn more about CEWT here.
You may also want to take a look at our list of over 240 elephant-friendly travel companies here.