Tourism Concern

Tourism Concern is a UK lobby group dedicated to promoting ethical tourism around the world. They have put together guidelines based on ten frequently asked questions on best practice and fair treatment of porters.

Introduction
Since our campaign Trekking Wrongs: Porters’ Rights, Tourism Concern has maintained dialogue on porters’ working conditions with UK-based trekking operators and porter protection groups on the ground. As part of the campaign, Tourism Concern published a set of guidelines for UK operators and highlighted the important role they play in ensuring appropriate working conditions for porters. Since then, these guidelines have been incorporated into many trekking operators’ wider responsible tourism policies.

Tourism Concern believes there is still a lot of work to be done to ensure that policies have translated into positive action benefiting the porters. We sent out a questionnaire to porters’ groups and some UK-based trekking operators to get an update of current good practice in the treatment of porters in Nepal, Peru and Tanzania.

Tourism Concern hopes to encourage better practice among UK-based trekking operators by providing this practical overview of examples of good practice and recommendations from porter protection groups based in the destinations.

General recommendations
This practical overview is part of a larger and ongoing constructive dialogue. Listed below is the resulting set of general recommendations and actions to ensure fairer treatment of porters.

Porter Unions and Associations should be encouraged and supported, as they are forums that give voice to their own needs and concerns.

Creating, maintaining and reinforcing channels of communication between all groups involved in the trekking tourism sector are vital to ensuring the implementation of good practices.

A greater level of involvement and presence of the UK operator in the actual treks and within the portering communities is needed to translate into a higher resolve and increased ability to monitor the treatment of its porters.

Client awareness of the issues confronting the porters is needed and can significantly contribute to monitoring treatment of porters by ground agents.

The guidelines and commonly asked questions can be found on the website.

As this is an ongoing collaborative process to share experiences of good practice on the working conditions of porters, Tourism Concern welcomes feedback and additional comments. Contact: campaigns@tourismconcern.org.uk.