And click for a voluntourism adventure in New Orleans.

Voluntourism house building

Something vaguely complimentary about the hotel or the food?

A casual observation about the weather?

How much more exciting would it be, and how much more interesting would your friends and family think you were if you wrote things like “Finished building a medical centre” or “Helped construct some classrooms”?

Would you like to feel better about yourself AND be cooler to people that know you?

We’re here to help. Take a look at our incentive travel programs !

Charity challenges and voluntourism

There’s nothing wring with this – we all get that hibernation instinct around this time of year! – but why not use this quiet time to think about a new challenge?

Comfort zones are there to be ventured out from, and here at Hands Up Incentives, we’re ready, willing and able to help you do just that. As well as ethical incentive trips , we can help you flesh out, design and execute all manner of personal challenges, or team building challenges for your company.

Raise money for charity, broaden your horizons and look back at that comfort zone from a dizzying height! See our Charity Challenge pages for more.

Eco-luxe voluntourism

A popular misconception is that you have to rough it to volunteer…perhaps that is because volunteering is associated with students. We understand that there are people who want to help and make a difference, and who want fabulous accommodation as well. The magic is in the mixing of the volunteer projects and then time in luxury hotels that also meet our sustainability standards.

Kenya - Eco-luxe voluntourism

You could stay in a luxury tented camp in Morocco, a solar-heated lodge in Brazil or a sustainably-built hotel in Thailand. If you’d like to contribute to and enrich your next holiday destination – while staying in style – then check out the eco-tourism page on our website.

Voluntourism in Belize

Interesting to note that the UN Foundation has just officially listed the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System as “World Heritage in Danger” due to unsustainable tourism activity.

The UN is rising to the challenges of conservation, and you, too can help make a difference to the very communities that this marine system supports.

Voluntourism for solo travelers

Associations people make with solo trips include unfair surcharges for travelling or staying in a hotel alone, to awkward, single-types tours with uncomfortably forced social activities.

If you’re of a mind to adventure by yourself, voluntourism is one of the most ideal ways to do it. Not only do you get to have a memorable, life-changing trip, but you’re much more likely to meet like-minded people, bond over a shared endeavour and feel safe and secure in the hands of your expert local guides. If you’re looking for a rewarding solo trip, be sure to check our Solo Traveler Notice Board.

Galapagos Clean Ocean Voluntourism

Well, you could try the world’s coastlines.

Add over a million plastic bags to that haul and you’ve got just some of the garbage collected on International Coastal Clean-Up day. The global operation, which relies on volunteerism, is promoted by Ocean Conservancy (www.oceanconservancy.org) and is this year celebrating 25 years of cleaning up our seas.

Nine million volunteers from 152 countries and locations have cleaned 145 million pounds of trash from the shores of lakes, streams, rivers, and the ocean on just one day each year each September.

Impressive stuff, and you can make a difference like this as part of a voluntourism trip to the Galapagos as you assist local fishermen to clean-up beaches normally off-limit to tourists.

Galapagos Wildlife Voluntourism

Luxury voluntourism Costa Rica

We are delighted to be partnered with Rainforest Alliance, and to celebrate Rainforest Alliance Week which begins on the 19th September, you can have a 20% discount off a luxury voluntourism trip to Costa Rica, using eco-luxury Rainforest Alliance certified hotels throughout.

Conservation voluntourism Costa Rica

Like with all our trips, you get to make a difference in conserving Costa Rica’s wildlife, with three days of this fabulous 11 day itinerary spent looking after animals that have been illegally kept as pets, helpig them to be re-introduced to the wild. Animals include monkeys, parrots, and the delightful sloth – an easy one to keep an eye on!

Costa Rica voluntourism

In addition, you get to enjoy a Rainforest Alliance certified coffee farm, the mighty Arenal volcano, and finish up in the stunning Punta Arenas with beaches and wildlife in the Manuel Antonio National Park.

The price for this eco-luxury adventure is reduced by 20% from US$5,330 to US$4,265 per person, plus flights.

But hurry!

To claim your 20% discount, you need to book your voluntourism trip before the 30th of September 2011, for travel anytime until October 2012.

Click here to book or read the full itinerary of this deluxe eco-adventure in gorgeous Costa Rica.

To find out more about our partnership with Rainforest Alliance, click here.

Have an inspiring weekend and enjoy Rainforest Alliance week!

Hands Up luxury voluntourism

As a New Zealander, I am passionate about my country, and very excited that the Rugby World Cup will do what the Lord of the Rings did earlier this decade and help people see what New Zealand has to offer.

There is so much to see and do here; some of my favorite places are:
- Waiheke Island 30 minutes from Auckland
- Old whaling town Russell in the Bay of Islands
- Hawke’s Bay and its superb wine
- Hiking or biking in Queen Charlotte Sound
- Overnight cruise and kayak in Doubtful Sound
- The rugged Catlins coastline and waterfalls

This is just scratching the surface – you can pick and choose to suit you, and all of these can be combined with fabulous luxury lodges, and a meaningful volunteer project to round-out your experience.

How to make your luxury New Zealand trip meaningful

Wildlife conservation in Hawkes Bay
The Cape Kidnappers and Ocean Beach Wildlife Preserve is a significant ecological mainland restoration project, situated on privately owned land on the iconic peninsula of Cape Kidnappers, Hawke’s Bay.
The vision is to restore many of the plant and animal communities that existed on the peninsula prior to human colonization.
You can play your part in a ground-breaking environmental conservation project to help save native birds, including kiwi.
The project is being undertaken on a large scale and across a mosaic of different habitat types. It is large enough to accommodate viable populations of most forest birds (including kiwi), and the movement of species which range widely over a variety of different habitats).

The large size of the preserve enables it to potentially support at least 400+ kiwi pairs and makes it the largest kiwi area protected from predators in Hawke’s Bay.

When to help?

The best time for you to assist at the sanctuary would be early December until early January, and early March to early April.

During these dates there are seabird chicks of two species (Cook’s petrel and Grey faced petrel) on site. The chicks have come from offshore islands where colonies still exist naturally, in the absence of predators. The chicks are hand fed on alternate days until they fledge after about three weeks and head out to sea. Feeding involves teams of 5 or 6 volunteers each time. It is a fantastic experience, ideal for families or honeymooners.

You get to help carry the chicks from their burrows to the “Petrel Station” where they are weighed, measured and fed a “sardine smoothie”, mimicking what they would be fed in the wild by their parents.

If you come any other time of year you can assist with the day to day running of the sanctuary, which would involve pest control work (servicing bait stations, checking traps, running tracking tunnels).

A Sample Itinerary (as seen in the NY Times)
Whilst we can tailor-make your itinerary just for you, to give you a flavor of what you can experience in New Zealand, click to view our sample 18 day luxury voluntourism itinerary.

This itinerary was recently featured in the New York Times, and is priced at US$29,990 (£18,800, A$28,000, €21,300) per adult, excluding international flights.

Luxury lodges for you
Naturally the lodges you stay at depend on where you choose to visit, but here are a small selection of my favorites:
- The Farm at Cape Kidnappers – your base for your wildlife conservation experience!
- Delamore Lodge on Waiheke Island
- Eagles Nest in Russell, Bay of islands
- Azur Lodge in Queenstown
- Matakauri Lodge near Queenstown
- Silver Pine Lodge near Lake Wanaka
- Pen y Bryn in historic Oamaru
- Bay of Many Coves in Queen Charlotte Sound

You can book your luxury voluntourism adventure to New Zealand by:
- call us from the US/Canada on 201 984 5372
- call us from the UK on 0207 193 1062
- call us from anywhere else on +44 207 193 1062
- email us at fun@handsupholidays.com

Voluntourism New Zealand

In the meantime, enjoy the rugby world cup!

Exclusive goods and services with sound environmental and social credentials does not have to be a contradictory idea.

Luxury and sustainability are two words you may not particularly expect to find in the same sentence. You may even think they are antithetical concepts.

But stop and think: what is luxury? Traditionally, luxury may be defined as an inessential, desirable item that is expensive or difficult to obtain; nowadays, we could fit within that category things such as time, copper, cod…

As social and environmental stresses increase and global resources come under greater pressure, the concept of luxury, always fluid, will keep changing.

There have also been positive efforts within the sustainability movement to redefine luxury as something that embodies the social and environmental credentials of a product or service.

Leading the way in this area, the WWF report Deeper Luxury, by Jem Bendell and Anthony Kleanthous, defined authentic luxury brands as “those that provide the greatest positive contribution to all affected by their creation and that identify their consumers as having the means and motivation to respect both people and planet”.

If we read ‘luxury’ as placing an importance on durability, pride in buying less and better, the link to sustainability becomes less jarring. Vivienne Westwood, in a recent interview, encouraged customers to “choose well and buy less” and she does not stop there. Westwood recently launched a collection of up-cycled bags and iPad cases in partnership with the UN and the World Trade Organisation. The project helps to create jobs amongst Africa’s most impoverished women – single mothers, widows and HIV/Aids victims.

And she is not alone in using up-cycling as a means of cutting waste and turn it into luxury. Elvis & Kresse, whose products are stocked in Harrods, make a stylish rage of high-end bags, wallets, belts and cases from decommissioned fire-brigade hoses that would normally end up in landfill. Fifty per cent of profits from the fire-hose line are donated to the Fire Fighters Charity. Taking into account social and environmental impacts as well as quality and style in design and innovation processes results in “positive luxury”.

Some major luxury brands are starting to get the message. Earlier this year PPR — the owner of a string of luxury brands including Gucci – set out a major new sustainability strategy called PPR HOME. Its CEO, François-Henri Pinault, said: “My deep conviction that sustainability creates value is part of my strategic vision for PPR. Sustainability can – and must – give rise to new, highly ambitious business models and become a lever of competitiveness for our brands.”

Perhaps positive luxury isn’t as far away as we may think. I’m convinced that those who want products of the highest quality do not have to compromise on ethics — that luxury and sustainability can go hand in hand.

Diana Verde Nieto runs PositiveLuxury.com, you can follow her on twitter @dianaverdenieto.

We love providing you with eco-luxury accommodation as part of a voluntourism adventure, to help make your luxury trip with a heart all the more sustainable – come join us!

The TV show even mentions a couple of resorts in the Maldives offering luxury voluntourism opportunities: Banyan Tree and Soneva Fushi, both of which are fantastic, and highly recommended!

Good on Channel 4 for portraying a different way of travelling, and for identifying ways that tourism can do harm, and highlighting ways that it doesn’t have to.

We booked in for a mountain bike ride, preceded by a walk through the forest which we had to cut short in order to make it back for the bike ride…where we were joined by a gaggle of Buenos Aires teenage girls. It was a good workout up and down hills, stopping off at a gorgeous chapel with views back to the hotel.

There was enough time after the ride for me to fit in a kayak paddle on the lake, around a small island, so in one day we did the physical highlights of Bariloche: hiking, mountain biking and kayaking – it felt great! We finished the day in the pool and jacuzzi which topped the day off perfectly. Incredible food at the hotel too!

Cerro Campanario was our main activity on Sunday – we took the chairlift up although we could have hiked up as it was not as high as we has thought it would be, but the views were amazing, I think National Geographic was justified in naming this one of the Top 10 views in the world, but I must dig up this article and see what other places are ranked.

For your own luxury volunteering volunteer adventure visit Hands Up Holidays.

It is a gorgeous coach ride alongside seven lakes to Villa la Angostura, where our accommodation was looking over the lake, some  distance form town which was not on the lake at all as I had thought. We discovered we were too late for Angostura’s primary attraction: a walk through the Arruyanes Forest, a type of tree only found in this area – the last ferry out to the starting point was at 2pm at this time of year, and the earliest the following morning was at 1115 but we had just booked our onward ride at 1030am.

Audrey’s sunglasses had broken so we began our odyssey in search of new ones, but no joy in this town. No one in the tourist office spoke English, and we were told that Angostura is ‘muy tranquillo’…he was right, although the view from our hotel was spectacular, only to be surpassed the following day by the sublime Llao Llao hotel in Bariloche.

Sister Maria informed us that there are always things for volunteers to do, from helping the permanent caregivers with their daily tasks such as cleaning, meal preparation and serving, through to helping in the garden, taking the ladies on a picnic excursion to one of the islands, or, what I am hoping we can persuade a corporate to do for an incentive trip, is to fund the costs to finish the construction of a new building that has been sporadic over the last 4 years due to lack of funds. This new building will provide a lot more space for the ladies, and enable the sisters to care for more women.

An incentive trip here could be blended with fabulous sightseeing in B.A, and even include some relaxation time on an estancia a couple of hours away.

To have your own volunteer adventure, visit http://www.handsupholidays.com

“At the Ritz-Carlton Kapalua, luxury is the order of the day. Here on Maui’s northwest shore, between two championship golf courses, most guests are lounging poolside reading Malcolm Gladwell or slowly sipping tropical cocktails.

But some of us are choosing to spend the day digging out weeds. It’s not even 9 a.m. and here I am, covered in bug spray and ready for a morning of weed-whacking at the nearby Maunalei Arboretum. The mission: to dig out non-native plants and gather native seeds for replanting to renew Hawaii’s largest private nature preserve.

“This is a very special place with some rare and endangered species,” says Megan Webster, stewardship coordinator of the Pu’u KuKui Watershed Preserve. “We have a crew of six people and we manage 8,000 acres.” And now, Ritz-Carlton guests can help too.

Welcome to the newest trend in luxury travel: upscale voluntourism. At a time when many travellers are choosing budget trips, guests at four- and five-star destinations are increasingly interested in worthy causes – from doing ecological work to rebuilding houses in New Orleans. And high-end hotels are responding, bringing carefully curated do-gooding into their guest offerings.

Though voluntourism began in the 1960s, it has broadened in popularity in the past decade; a recent survey suggested that more than three million Americans did some long-distance volunteering last year. And while it has been associated with longer stays in developing countries – away from the trappings of tourism – in the past year, volunteering has become an activity of choice for many luxury vacationers.

David Clemmons, founder of voluntourism.org, suggests two things are inspiring high-end travellers: economic strife and a number of big names doing high-profile charity work. “Extremely wealthy individuals like Bono, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, Richard Branson, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates are putting humongous sums of money into social causes,” he says. That’s translating into a “consumer consciousness” around social responsibility, he adds, “and a movement within the luxury market to [create] social purpose within their offerings.”

Tour companies, too, have discovered there’s a market for combining luxury in exotic destinations with a dollop of social conscience. California-based Exquisite Safaris, for example, creates custom itineraries for places such as Kenya and Vietnam that include a humanitarian element. For example, between watching lions and gnus on the grasslands of the Serengeti, eating gourmet meals and being pampered with spa treatments, guests may spend a morning teaching local children how to read.

Similarly, a 10-day trip to India from U.K.-based tour operator Hands Up Holidays incorporates multi-day projects such as renovation work in a New Delhi slum or a stint in a school helping to teach “India’s poorest children.” Accommodation, however, is in a five-star hotel throughout. This, says the company, allows travellers to experience the “two extremes of India.”

These hotels and tour operators are meeting a new and clear customer demand. “If you want to maintain your relationship with your consumers, which is what the luxury market relies upon,” Clemmons says, “then it is imperative to be developing products and services with a social purpose.”

This sort of contribution – eco-conscious volunteering in attractive settings – has proved to be especially popular among luxury guests. Ritz-Carlton’s options include feeding and tracking rare iguanas on Grand Cayman. Likewise, Fairmont Hotels and Resorts’ Community Conscious Vacations program has guests planting cedars in Bermuda and restoring turtle habitats in Mexico. “Many guests share our commitment to the community and planet and are looking for ways to volunteer,” says Fairmont spokesperson Mike Taylor.

But do they need to stay in comfortable resorts to do so? There is an irony in this juxtaposition, especially in developing countries, says Nancy Gard McGehee, an associate professor at Virginia Tech’s Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management.

On the other hand, she suggests that good work is good work. “If this type of experience exposes high-end travellers to volunteer tourism when they otherwise might not have done anything,” she says, “then there is great value in these kinds of experiences.”

In New Orleans, Tusa says Habitat for Humanity is benefiting from that dynamic. The local organization “has received tremendous support” from its partnership with Marriott, Tusa says, and such connections “give the traveller the option to volunteer without having to do a lot of the groundwork of setting things up.”

“These programs,” she says, “are doing a lot of good.”

Pack your bags

TOUR OPERATORS

EXQUISITE SAFARIS http://www.exquisitesafaris.com. The California-based company offers custom itineraries to 36 countries (expect to pay about $2,000 a person a day).

HANDS UP HOLIDAYS http://www.handsupholidays.com. The U.K.-based company offers tours with volunteer components in a dozen countries around the world.”