Story by Brett Tollman, CEO of The Travel Corporation.
In 2020, we are celebrating two important milestones – our TreadRight Foundation’s 12th year and our parent company’s 100th anniversary.
TreadRight is our not-for-profit foundation supported by The Travel Corporation’s (TTC) family of 30 award-winning brands around the world.
As a fourth-generation, family owned business, we are also celebrating the 100th anniversary of TTC, which was founded by my grandfather, Solomon Tollman. He opened our first hotel in South Africa 100 years ago, and we continue to build on his enduring legacy.
Our mission statement is to Make Travel Matter, with a commitment to creating a positive impact by helping to safeguard the people and communities we visit, to help protect and respect wildlife, and to care for our planet for generations to come.
TreadRight has supported more than 50 sustainable tourism projects worldwide to date. Our support is provided through grants and donations to leading partners across the sustainable travel spectrum and all funding comes from our company. We do not believe it is our place to ask our guests and travelers to donate.
We understand that making travel matter is important to our travelers and we are dedicated to reducing our environmental impact too. It is estimated that eight million tons of discarded plastics end up polluting our oceans annually.
Since 2013, our TTC teams across the globe have logged more than 34,000 volunteer hours, including beach clean-ups of plastic waste. Since 2018, TTC and our global brands have committed to eliminating all avoidable single-use plastics across our operations by 2022.
We already no longer make single-use plastic bottles available on our motor coaches, including Luxury Gold. We are working with our partners on the ground to make sure our valued guests still have access to clean drinking water, and we will identify convenient points along their journey where they can safely and responsibly source drinking water. Even more has been done within our luxury hotels and on board our luxury river ships.
Our guests are positively impacted by our initiatives to make travel matter. We have invested in and introduced an electronic document system to replace paper, while committing to plant a tree for each guest who opts for e-documents with our partner, One Tree Planted (OTP).This notable not-for-profit organization is focused on global reforestation, with a mission to create a world full of trees. Luxury Gold Cares and OTP are planting trees in India to help support this destination’s fragile ecosystem and the millions of people there who depend on forest products for subsistence.
As engaged citizens of the world, we all can do more, share best practices, as well as to reduce, reuse and recycle in our respective daily lives so we can help build and preserve a more sustainable planet for future generations. Thank you for helping us on this journey by being a responsible, involved traveler and citizen too.
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