An alternative Easter holiday | Sam's internship at Rickshaw

Here at Rickshaw, we’re always welcoming interns into the world of Meaningful Travel. Our internship programme gives people an opportunity to experience Rickshaw first-hand; what we do and what makes us different. Meet Sam, our most recent intern, who is currently studying Travel, Tourism and Business and decided to spend his two-week Easter break with us. Here’s his story:

What is responsible travel to me?

Having travelled on a week’s trek across the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco in 2014, I had first-hand experience of staying with local people in some of the most dramatic areas of North Africa. From this I saw how responsible tourism can have significant benefits on a developing country by minimising impact on the environment and ensuring local people are directly paid for their services.

I’m in my second year of Travel and Tourism at Sussex Downs College (Brighton) and one of the modules we study is Responsible Tourism, which I experienced in Morocco. Rickshaw Travel base all of their fantastic itineraries upon this concept. I particularly enjoy this module because of the importance of building and sustaining partnerships between the culture, businesses and people in worldwide destinations.

This module is taught by a visiting lecturer, Vicky, who is part of the management team at Rickshaw. I feel she really brings to life how responsible travel in ‘less economically developed countries’ has significant benefits to their communities. Rickshaw Travel provides their clients with a unique experience of staying and working alongside local communities often in remote destinations, to experience the real country at heart.

I didn’t just eat chocolate!

Over the two weeks at Rickshaw I learnt a huge amount on the variety of roles within a tour operator, not really knowing how many different teams there would be. The team made me feel really welcome and I had a number of interesting tasks and projects allocated to me during the week. The tasks were really varied from working on their customer review tool, to uploading itineraries to partner websites.

During my second week I reviewed customer feedback to find nice quotes to feature on relevant pages on the website, helping other users to get a sense of what Rickshaw are all about.

I also had the chance to review the different Indonesian bookings for quarter 1: January to March 2016. This involved looking at each customer’s itinerary to see how they were built over the course of several days to several weeks. The information was then entered into a spreadsheet to analyse trends in the bookings which were then provided to the sales and marketing team to help steer decisions.

All in all I have found the experience really rewarding, and I am most grateful for Vicky giving me the chance to do this internship. Everyone made me feel part of the team and I’ve never known the days to pass so quickly. Yes, I could have stayed at home relaxing during my holidays, but having a fortnight’s experience of how a travel business works is invaluable.

So if you are reading this and looking to work within the tourism industry then there’s no better place than Rickshaw to start that journey!

Sam

Fancy interning with us?