Travel with purpose, no guilt | Byron Thomas from Niarra Travel
Welcome to Roaming Roots, everyone!
Today I have the pleasure of having Byron Thomas, founder of Niarra Travel, as my very first guest.
Niarra Travel is a company that operates on the principles of transparency and purpose, creating unforgettable trips to inspiring places while directing more tourism revenue to the people and communities protecting our increasingly fragile natural world.
In this episode, we will be exploring the future of travel and tourism with Byron, we will learn about his background and how he got into the industry, as well as the work that Niarra Travel does. We will also be discussing the importance of conservation and connecting people, the dilemmas related to travel, and what we can do to make travel more responsible.
I have to say that this conversation changed some of my views about travel and that was exactly what I hoped for with this podcast! And coming from Scandinavia, where the term flight shame originated, Byron gave me some food for thought.
Links:
How to choose a responsible tour operator, by Byron Thomas
Today's Travel Toolkit:
The Bucket List Eco Experiences: Traveling the World, Sustaining the Earth, by Juliet Kinsman
Roaming Roots will live at Bycause.co and you can follow the journey by signing up to the newsletter.
To get a direct link to my constantly evolving library of responsible travel resources, go to bycause.co/resources.
Transcript
Summary
In this episode, the host interviews Byron Thomas, the founder of Niarra Travel, a company that focuses on responsible and mindful travel and tourism. Byron shares his background, how he got into the industry, and the work that Niarra Travel does. He explains how their goal is to create unforgettable trips while directing more tourism revenue to local communities and protecting the environment. They discuss the importance of conservation and connecting people, the dilemmas related to travel, and how to make travel more responsible. Byron shares his story of growing up in South Africa, followed by a bit of time in London, and then doing volunteer work in Africa's townships. John initially worked in banking and then decided to take some time to explore the world and be closer to his family. He moved to London and found a job with a travel company looking to set up an Africa department. After 10 years he was offered the opportunity to head up Nyara, a Swahili word meaning with utmost purpose. The name was inspired by a beautiful park in northern Mozambique called Nyasa, which had been decimated by wars and had very little tourism. John and the other participants in a conference discussed the problems facing the park, and the need to find a way to protect it through tourism, conservation and hunting. Niarra is a tour operator that puts together trips to Nyasa, a beautiful area in Africa. The name originates from the term nyara which is used by the local community and means with utmost purpose. Niarra seeks to provide more than just the standard travel agent service by accounting for carbon and looking for carbon drawdown projects so that the environment isn't affected by the trips they offer. They also pay close attention to the local community to make sure their trips are beneficial to them. Nara is a travel company that works to reduce carbon emissions and ensure that local communities benefit from tourism. They take 10% commission from lodgers, instead of the industry standard of 35%. This helps to ensure that more money goes directly to the local community. They are also working on carbon drawdown projects with BCP BioCarbon Partners in Africa. Nara challenges the industry to take less commission and send more money to local communities in order to prevent industry leakage and preserve the natural environment.
Transcript
[:[0:00:45] Veslemøy: I am so, so excited about this project and I hope that you are too. The place to find resources and everything related to the podcast will be at my homepage bycous Co. So that is bycauce Co. Hope to see you there. And now to today's episode. Today I have the pleasure of having Byron Thomas, the founder of Niarra Travel, as my very first guest. Naira Travel is a company that operates on principles of transparency and purpose, creating unforgettable trips to inspiring places while directing more tourism revenue to the people and communities protecting our increasingly fragile natural world.
[:[0:02:15] Veslemøy: And coming from Scandinavia, where the term flight shame originated, barren gave me some food for thought. So wait for that later in the episode. Be sure to check out the links in the episode description for more information on Niarra Travel and responsible Travel in general. Thank you for listening and thank you, Byron, for sharing your insights with us.
[:[0:02:53] C: Thank you so much for having me.
[:[0:03:19] Byron: Yeah, totally. Bit of an accident. So basically I grew up in South Africa, had a fairly modest upbringing. Folks couldn't afford us going to those four of us couldn't afford us or going to universities and the worked in a bit of time in London in my early 20s, then went back to Africa and was doing community volunteer work in the townships in and around Africa. And then after doing that for five years, I wanted to do something else, start again, see the world a bit more, be closer to the family. So moved to London, was looking for a job.
[:[0:04:38] Byron: And yeah, about ten years later, I got the opportunity to head up Naira.
[:[0:05:00] Byron: Yeah. So a few years ago I was at a conference and some videographers showed this absolutely beautiful place called Nyasa. So not Nahara, but Nyatha is what we call it today. It's a beautiful park in northern Mozambique. And we were talking about the problems that that place faces. Wars had decimated the majority of the wildlife in that area. And still to this day, tourism, sort of photographic tourism, has a very small, almost nonexistent sort of impact on that area. The majority of that area is looked after by hunting.
[:[0:06:21] Byron: It was actually Mr. David Livingston that misheard the real name. And the local community used to call that area Nyara, so it was two R's, not two S's. And so we decided to use Niarra mainly when we found out that that word in Swahili, so further up the continent means with utmost purpose. And we were like, okay, there you go, that's the name.
[:[0:07:03] Byron: Yeah, what we do is we put together trips. So we're not a travel agent. A travel agent, someone, generally speaking, in your local community that can just sort of set up trips for you and book things on your behalf. We're a tour operator, so we put together an entire trip in a destination and sell you the entire trip. Yeah. And that's really what we do functionally now, how we do it. And the reason Nara is a little bit more special than more standard trips that you can book, is that we have those things in mind. So first of all your carbon.
[:[0:08:29] Byron: We use some folks in Africa called BCP BioCarbon Partners, and these guys are really sort of industry leading in how they work with carbon drawdown projects. Then your trips also have a hopefully equal impact on the local communities and cultures that you're visiting, and conservation projects as well. And we do that through taking less commission than the standard commission model of the industry, which in Africa tends to be as much as 35%.
[:[0:09:41] Byron: Yeah. So you avoid what you're calling the leakage. That often happens with too little money going directly to the local community. Right. That's what you're working towards.
[:[0:10:31] Byron: So, yeah, that's what we're trying to prevent. That industry leakage term I remember seeing. Just this year, the African Leadership University ran a report on sort of state of conservation in Africa and they actually warned about sort of overly attacking the trade and overly saying that these people are taking too much money respecting the trade and respecting the fact that people in the industry are doing a lot of hard work.
[:[0:11:52] Byron: So it's about just thinking about the future a little bit more. Nara is doing that. We're trying to challenge everyone in the industry to just say, can you send more? Can you take one 2510 percent less? Whatever you can do. What can you do to support the changes and the investment into the areas that we send our travelers to?
[:[0:12:39] C: Yeah.
[:[0:12:45] C: Yeah, I think that's safe to say. Our investors and my sort of founding team are quite Africa centric. I think this industry leakage thing is the majority of the problem is in Africa. There are a lot of places where the commissions that are given out in Europe, for example, are just nowhere near that. The value proposition of Nara, from an industry challenging perspective, is a lot more straightforward in Africa. And Africa has a lot of work to do. It has a lot of things that it needs to constantly invest in and look after.
[:[0:13:58] Byron: Yeah, we need to talk a little bit about the main reason behind this podcast, which is that my idea that we need to have more than one thought in our heads at the same time. So one of the big issues often coming up when we talk about travel is the impact it has on climate and the emissions and the environmental parts, but there's other aspects to consider. So, for instance, what you talked about conservation, but also connecting people and open minds, as you say on your website.
[:[0:14:54] C: You and I have already had a discussion about your kids and where they should travel as they get older. And I think one of the things we need to be very careful about is to not be anti human in how we think about dealing with the climate emergency that we have and also with the loss of biodiversity that we face. I think I often say this, but travel and tourism is the only thing that I'm aware of that first and foremost has a vested financial interest in improving and expanding, not just protecting biodiversity.
[:[0:16:10] C: I remember as a kid hearing that we're deforesting the Amazon soccer pitch a day sort of thing. As far as I'm aware, that's been happening for my entire existence, that's decades now, and that's a crazy thought. Imagine if we had double the amounts of rainforests. Imagine if we had the biodiversity on our side that had never been lost, that all that carbon that was in these deforested areas had stayed in the earth.
[:[0:17:43] C: And so I would say this idea of not flying is something we have to revisit. It's like, no, actually, everyone get in planes, go look after these places, go invest in them, go spend your tourist dollars in these areas. It's super important to do that, because it's the only way that in this imperfect world that runs, unfortunately, on money and economies, that's the only way we can do that. And I think if there's any positives to come out of the luxury world is that all this money floats to the top and gets rich people richer.
[:[0:18:57] Byron: Yeah, very interesting.
[:[0:19:37] Veslemøy: I am really early in my journey in exploring the world of responsible travel but my library of books related to the topic is slowly growing. I think this book was the second I bought. It's called The Bucket List eco Experiences traveling the world Sustaining the Earth and it's by Juliet Kinsmann who is a very well known travel writer and sustainability expert and I'm sure I will mention her a number of times in this podcast.
[:[0:20:52] Veslemøy: So you can explore sustainable accommodation, culture, food, nature, volunteering, wildlife and you can just choose what suits you the best or where your interests are. And there are so many beautiful pictures and you really end up wanting to go places. But the good thing here is that if you for instance are going on a vacation to France and a specific city, you can look it up in this book and you can find different the best ecofriendly places to stay or restaurants to go to or other kinds of experiences.
[:[0:22:10] Veslemøy: Travel by train goes lower by local, waste less. So this book is highly recommended from me and it will open your mind to more ethical, responsible and not the least more fun and adventurous ways of traveling. I will put the link in the show notes and the episode description. And now back to the episode.
[:[0:22:50] Byron: When we set up, we originally planned for it to be Africa first and then sort of spilling out as we grow. But we know a lot of places around the world and have met a lot of people in the communities that we are part of, most notably the long run community, which I'll speak to now. And we realize that there are just these awesome places to go to that really need the support. So again, I spoke about the Serrado just now.
[:[0:24:00] Byron: Brazil has a huge problem with soy plantations in the game. That's sort of an agricultural thing that's going into meat production. And there's tons of articles and studies that show that even in a shop here in London, if you're not careful, you're going to inadvertently be destroying biodiverse areas in Brazil because of where that goes and how quickly it gets to our food chain. So we choose our areas based on where people need to visit, where people need to in an emergency sort of setting, need to look after biodiversity.
[:[0:25:25] Byron: It's a tiny little place. If you look at it on Google maps, it's a tragic thing, really. When you see as you zoom in on a satellite image of Africa, you see this awesome dark green of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Congo rainforest, the second biggest forest in the world as far as Sprawl, but actually not dissimilar in its capacity because it's a much taller rainforest than the Amazon.
[:[0:26:34] Byron: And they have lived in that forest for thousands of years, along with the mountain gorillas. But the government of the time decided, there's no real way of saying this, they decided that the buttwo needed to move and the gorillas needed to have that land. And so you had this tragic scenario where this amazing culture of people that live in forests and know how to deal and live in a forest in a sustainable way are kicked out because of the gorillas.
[:[0:27:46] Byron: And I do think that one of the biggest threats that we face in humanity is as humanity is the loss of biodiversity to a point where it's not able to recover itself. But we're making a mistake and I think there's been some missteps in conservation and not looking after the people and the communities of the area. And so we are, let's say, biodiversity first. But again, I just want to drive this point home, is that we still consider the local communities and the local people as part of that biodiversity.
[:[0:29:01] Byron: Deforestation is close by or agricultural sprawl is threatening that grassland, whatever. We are keen on sending as many people there as possible and we use places that look after the local communities and get the local communities involved as much as possible as well. There's a difficulty there and this is the more commercial challenge that presents to us is that most people have a very pre marketed, preset of ideas on what they want to do.
[:[0:30:12] Byron: How about you go do this, this and this instead? So our marketing, in a way needs to grab the right people that don't necessarily know the best places or the most important places to go. So that's what we do. We have this marketing out there that goes hey, travel with us, we do it properly, and if you want to see the migration in Tanzania, that's fine, you can. But then you'll be also be speaking to a travel researcher that is qualified in sustainable travel.
[:[0:31:04] Veslemøy: Yeah, so when I started looking into this world of more responsible travel, it was like this big new sandbox opening up for me and very interesting to see everything which is happening in this space. So you have also, at some point, been used today is more responsible and conscious travel. So what surprised you the most about, like, good or bad or how long or how far we have to go? Or you have any thoughts on that when you first started exploring this space?
[:[0:32:32] Byron: What's the real cost of the local community? Is it positive or are you having a negative effect there? How do you deal with the complexities, for example, of whether you're looking after and positively impacting a culture? Should you be positively impacting a local culture? Should you not be positively should you not be impacting it at all? Like, what am I saying? It's complex. It's really complex.
[:[0:33:25] Byron: All yeah.
[:[0:34:15] Byron: There's a handful of lodges in Africa, on the entire continent of Africa that are using electric vehicles. My point there is there isn't enough the people, the lodges that are doing what you need to be sustainable. They aren't enough of them. So the question is, do we stop traveling? Well, that's the biggest complexity is sort of accounting for it and measuring it so that we just know at what point should we say no?
[:[0:35:26] Byron: It really is okay to travel as long as you're traveling to places that truly need your money. Yeah. It's not just about carbon. It's about water usage. It's about your energy usage. It's about your impact on communities from a financial perspective. It's about making sure that people's cultures are going to survive all these things. The biggest thing, like we said earlier, is biodiversity. The loss of biodiversity is one of if not, I believe it's the single biggest threat that we face, and it's a precursor to the climate challenge. And if we had destroyed half or less than half of what we already have destroyed, I don't think we'd be in this situation where we're facing the point of these sort of tipping points that we might not get back from.
[:[0:36:27] Byron: So protecting biodiversity is absolutely key. If you do that in a trip that you want to go on, you're probably in the right place. It's probably justified.
[:[0:37:15] Byron: So for me, it would be more important that we travel to explore and to get to know other cultures and see the nature that we want to preserve, et cetera. So kind of just flipping it.
[:[0:38:18] Byron: So my challenge to everyone is let's try and get that average down as much as possible, considering that a lot of us live in these places that have high levels of emissions per capita. Also something I've been thinking about a lot recently is we also need to remember that people can't freeze in winter and heating homes in North America. Europe is a big part of that equation. That's just a reality. It's a geographic reality of where we live.
[:[0:39:30] Byron: I'm not saying everyone needs to be vegan. That's not the answer, I don't think either. There is 8 billion people on this planet right now, and a huge amount of the food that we generate goes to the meat industry. That's a much bigger problem in the world than travel. Something like 25% of our emissions is food related. So think about that from that perspective. Curbing your flying is going to reduce two to 3% of the world's emissions.
[:[0:40:50] Byron: And if to some extent you can take that on as a mission, then we reduce that. Then all of a sudden we start reducing things that can and should be reduced because they are superfluous, they are too much, they are excessive. I've been to some conferences sometimes in conservation that are great, awesome conferences. And then we had one once that was online and it was actually my favorite conference, and I felt like we got the most done and said and I'm like, Guys, we work in conservation. Like, we should maybe not have these across the world.
[:[0:42:01] Byron: And conversely, if you're vegan but you're flying all over the place, then that's not going to help either. It's about thinking about what we can actually afford, which is scarily too low at the moment. And I think just because we can't realistically get to 2.3 tons per year doesn't mean we shouldn't hugely reduce. But we need to, we obviously need to rely on technology and hopefully rewilding and rebuild diversification of the planet to deal with the debt that we're getting in right now.
[:[0:43:09] Byron: So let's start with that last bit first. What changes would I like to see? Well, as someone who currently runs a travel company, I would say that travel is currently not sustainable. I think it's one of the areas that is trying to be sustainable and to a large extent is leading the way in some sort of way, but it's not there yet. And I think particularly when we look at the protection of biodiversity, again, going back to accurate accounting, we don't actually realize and haven't fully accounted for how truly valuable these beautiful biodiverse islands that we've got left are.
[:[0:44:48] Byron: You could say I use the word ownership because with ownership comes huge levels of responsibility and care as well. But I think that those things are what I would love to see. I'd love to see people that are truly not just looking after the biodiversity, but treating it as a financial asset that if you look after, can pay compound interest. Looking after the communities in that area, making sure that you consider that they are also part of nature, what we call nature. Making sure that humans are also in the equation and are looked after.
[:[0:46:09] Byron: This scandi vibe of flights, what do they call it? I think it's Danish.
[:[0:46:21] Byron: It's got to go. It's got to go because we should realize that travel and tourism is the single bastion of protection, the single shield in the financial perspective, which is how this whole world works, whether we like it or not. It's that only shield that biodiversity has to protect itself. And I think remembering as well that emissions from flying are an important thing to reduce. But please don't decide to not fly anymore because there are still huge places in the world that completely depend on tourism for livelihoods, but also for protecting the biodiversity and the beautiful places of nature that they look after.
[:[0:47:51] Byron: Just find companies like them or just completely travel with us. We'd be very happy with that as well. But yeah, that's what I would say. Travel is important and travel is something that you shouldn't feel any scarce about, any embarrassment about, as long as you do it properly, as long as you realize that there are places that should be traveled to and there are some places that shouldn't be traveled to as much as they used to be.
[:[0:48:46] Byron: Perfect.
[:[0:48:59] Byron: Thank you so much for having me and helping us get our mission out there to everyone. I really appreciate your time as well.
[:[0:49:49] Veslemøy: To follow this journey further, you know what to do. Hit follow or subscribe in your podcast app. And also, if you want a direct link into the library that I'm building of different resources about this topic, I have created this living page in Notion. Not very polished or pretty in any way, but hopefully a good source for knowledge and inspiration. You can find it at bycous Co resources. And that's all.
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