Rickshaw Travel is a B Corp!

Community

Across our network, the vast majority of the guides who show you around are local residents, people who know their destination not because they’ve studied it, but because they live it. The transfer companies that move you between places, and the touring companies that design your experiences on the ground, are overwhelmingly locally owned and operated. When you pay for a Rickshaw trip, we make sure that most of that money stays in the destination.

Some of what our partners are doing goes well beyond the basics. In Nepal, our partners have developed a community homestay network that actively opens new villages to tourism – places that previously sat alongside well-trodden trekking routes without receiving a penny from passing travellers. In Borneo, tourism facilitated through our network directly contributed to the revoking of two timber licences, protecting rainforest habitat that would otherwise have been lost. In Bhutan, the government’s own philosophy of low volume, high value tourism means that every trip we operate there is already working within one of the most deliberately sustainable tourism frameworks in the world – a country that receives fewer than 80,000 tourists per year by design.

We know our community score has room to grow – community-owned accommodation remains a relatively small proportion of what’s available across our destinations, and we’re actively working with partners to change that. But the direction of travel is clear, and it’s one we’ve been walking for a long time.

Our environmental score reflects something honest: that as a tour operator, the biggest environmental decisions from our office’s energy use to our carbon footprint throughout the journey, from our office to each destination. There are things we can’t control, and planes are a part of our day-to-day, but what we can control is who we work with, what we ask of them, and what we put on your itinerary. We contribute £5 per person who travels with us to a selection of projects with Earthly, from carbon credits to a bio-diversity project in the South Downs, near our hometown of Brighton.

Our office at Runway East in Brighton is B Corp certified, making sure all our practices are ethical and sustainable. You can find out more about Runway East’s sustainability policy here.

On wildlife, our position has been unambiguous since the beginning. We have never offered experiences that exploit animals for entertainment: no elephant riding, no performing animal shows, no captive wildlife encounters. We don’t just avoid these experiences; we’ve campaigned publicly against them, at a time when they were still common in mainstream travel brochures. You can find out more about our wildlife policy and our work with Animondial here.

On the ground a few of our partners need a shout out: Nepal, our partners are actively transitioning their transfer fleets from fossil fuel vehicles to electric, reducing the carbon footprint of every journey your trips include. In Costa Rica, where almost 100% of national energy comes from renewable sources, electric vehicle transfers are effectively zero-emission. In Bhutan, where 70% of the land is protected forest and the country is carbon negative, the environmental baseline is unlike almost anywhere else on earth.

Our workers score reflects something important: that how you treat the people inside your business is the clearest signal of how seriously you take everything else.

Our team enjoys excellent medical insurance and health perks, free gym membership, a company-wide bonus, development programmes and volunteer days. As a Brighton & Hove Living Wage employer, we pay all staff at or above the living wage, and we match employees’ charity fundraising.”

What we can say is that the same standards we hold ourselves to internally, we look for in the partners we work with. Across our network, local guides and staff are not a cost to be minimised – they are a continuation of our team. The expertise, warmth, and local knowledge your guide brings to your trip is what makes a Rickshaw journey different from booking a package. We treat it that way, and we choose partners who do the same.

When you travel with Rickshaw, the B Corp certification isn’t something that happens in a boardroom somewhere, you’ll feel it from the first call with your Travel Specialist to when you touch your destination.

We are committed to showing up and delivering on our word to our workers, community, the environment and staying transparent and accountable as a company.

It means the guide showing you around is someone who knows their destination intimately, who’s been part of our network for years, and who is paid and treated fairly for the expertise they bring. It means the places we put you in – the guesthouses, the lodges, the family-run restaurants are there because we’ve visited, vetted, and built real relationships with the people who run them, not because they were the easiest option.

It means the wildlife experiences on your itinerary are ones we’ve chosen carefully and audit regularly. And the ones that didn’t meet our standards simply aren’t there.

It means that when you pay for your trip, most of that money stays in the destination than you might expect, directly supporting local businesses, local guides, and local communities who’ve been part of what Rickshaw does since the very beginning.

It also means that we commit to transparency with our customers, and provide nothing short of excellent service and care.

We’re proud that we’ve been making sure that good things happen when you travel from day one, and extremely proud to have a certification to go along with it. You can discover more on our B Corp profile, and see the independent work that has led to our certification so you know there’s action where our words are. That’s what B Corp means for your next trip with us, not a badge on just a page on our website – but the reason your trip feels the way it does.