Planning · Responsible travel

What we will not book, and why

This is a list of refusals and working methods rather than a statement of values. Anybody can write that they care. What is checkable is which bookings an operator turns down, and what it does on the days when the right thing costs an hour.

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The four things we will not book

Every operator in Asia has a responsible travel page. Most of them are adjectives. The only part of ours worth your time is the list below, because a refusal costs money and an adjective does not, and you can hold us to a refusal.

We do not book	The reason, in one sentence
Elephant riding, anywhere	An elephant does not carry people willingly, and the training that makes one do it is the part nobody photographs. Observation-only sanctuaries, where the animals are not ridden, washed to order or made to perform, we will book and do.
Orphanage visits, and any paid access to children	Paying to meet children creates a market for children to be available, which is why residential centres cluster where tourists are rather than where need is; in Cambodia and Nepal this is documented well enough that no operator can plead ignorance.
Tiger, bear and primate photo attractions, and shows built on captive wildlife	An animal that stays still enough for a photograph beside a stranger has usually been sedated, declawed, hand-reared away from its mother or all three, and the ticket is what funds the next one.
Any journey into a place under do-not-travel advice	Highland Papua, central and western Mindanao, Jammu and Kashmir, the India–Pakistan border strip, Manipur, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and the 3 km Jordanian strip along the Syrian border all carry it, and so does the whole of Myanmar; we do not send clients where their insurance does not follow them and our people would carry the risk.

Two more sit alongside them. Myanmar we do not sell while the Level 4 advice from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia stands, and most Western insurance is void there in any case. Nor will we quote an itinerary whose selling point is a border that is shut: the Thailand–Cambodia land crossings have been closed since mid-2025 with no reopening timetable, so an overland Bangkok to Siem Reap day is a day nobody can run, and an operator still selling it either has not checked or is hoping you will not. The advisory picture country by country, dated, is on safety and advisories.

None of this is offered as a moral position you should share. It is what we will and will not put our name to, stated in advance so that a traveller who wants the elephant photograph can go and buy it from somebody else without either of us wasting a fortnight first.

The alms round at Luang Prabang, which is the whole argument in one hour

Tak bat, the dawn alms round, is the clearest worked example in Asia of the difference between attending something and consuming it. Monks and novices from the town monasteries walk a fixed route at first light in silence and receive the food they will eat that day. It happens every morning of the year whether or not anybody is watching, it is an obligation running in both directions between the monasteries and the households along the route, and it is not staged for anyone.

What has been done to it in places is on the record: flashes at arm’s length, visitors stepping into the line for a better angle, minibuses drawing up at the kerb, and vendors selling sticky rice to tourists that no household would offer a monk — sometimes swept up afterwards and sold again the next morning. The monasteries and the town authorities have asked for this to stop more than once.

What we brief, the night before, on every journey that passes through

Watch from the far pavement, seated or standing well back, or stay in bed. Nobody is owed a place in this. Sleeping through it costs you nothing.
No flash, at any distance, and no camera between a monk and the person kneeling to offer. If a shot requires you to move into the route, the answer is that you do not take it.
Do not buy the rice sold at the roadside. It is aimed at tourists, it is not food anyone would choose to give, and buying it is what keeps the trade running.
If you want to offer, arrange it the day before through us or the hotel: prepared rice, shoulders and knees covered, kneeling or seated low enough that your head stays below the monks’, food passed across without speaking.
Never follow the line down the street, and never hire a vehicle to keep pace with it.

The reason this page uses it as the example rather than a general paragraph about respect is that respect is unfalsifiable and these five rules are not. The place itself — the nights it needs, the falls, the train down from Vientiane — is on the Luang Prabang page, and the journey that spends three nights there is Laos in nine days.

Where the money actually goes on a private journey

A private journey is, in labour terms, a very simple thing: one driver and one guide, employed by the day, for the whole of your trip. That is the part travellers rarely price, and it is where the difference between two quotes for the same route usually hides.

Published ground rates give the shape of it. A car and driver in Sri Lanka runs about USD 50 to 70 a day for a saloon and USD 70 to 90 for a van, and that figure is inclusive of fuel, tolls, parking and the driver’s own food and lodging while he is away from home; a tip of USD 5 to 10 a day on top of it is customary and we say so in the documents rather than leaving you to guess at the airport. In India the equivalent is roughly USD 45 to 60 a day for a saloon and USD 65 to 90 for an Innova, with a guide charged separately per site or per day. In Bali a car and driver for a full day is USD 35 to 100, and the top of that band is what a good English-speaking driver is worth in July.

Two practices follow from those numbers. The first is that our drivers and guides are engaged for the whole journey rather than rebooked each morning, which costs more and is the reason a guide will tell you on day six that the plan for day seven is wrong — a man on a one-day contract has no interest in saying that. The second is that guiding in most of Asia is a licensed national profession with an examination behind it, and in Nepal a licensed guide has been legally compulsory on the main trekking routes since September 2023, with checkpoint enforcement tightened through 2026 and penalties reported up to NPR 50,000. Guiding is not a line item to be shaved.

What a quote 25% below ours has done

The difference has to come from somewhere, and there are only five places it can come from: a hotel one grade down or further out of town, a guide shared with another party or dropped for a driver who talks, a car booked by the day from whoever is cheapest that morning, commission-paying shopping stops written into the route, or the wage itself. It never comes out of the operator’s margin, because the margin is the reason the operator exists. How a price is built takes that apart line by line.

Crowding, and why the hour is a real decision rather than a scheduling trick

The single most useful thing a good operator does for the places it sells is move its clients out of the peak hours. This sounds like a convenience — a nicer photograph, a shorter queue — and it is not. Crowd damage at a heritage site is a function of how many people stand on the same stone in the same three hours, and every party that moves out of that window reduces the number that has to be managed with barriers, one-way systems and eventually bans.

Angkor

The inner loop between roughly nine in the morning and three in the afternoon is a queue at every doorway and a wait at every staircase, in full sun, on stone that holds heat. The pass structure is what solves it: the three-day pass costs USD 62 and its three days need not be consecutive, falling anywhere inside a ten-day window that opens when it is first scanned. So the site gets first light and late afternoon on two or three separate days rather than one long exhausted push, and the middle of every day belongs to a swimming pool. The Angkor page sets out how a three-day pass is actually spent.

Kyoto

Kyoto holds something like 1,600 temples in a street plan that predates the coach, and between about ten in the morning and four in the afternoon its famous sites are queues with gardens attached. The city has begun charging for the pressure rather than absorbing it: bus fares are moving to two tiers, with residents on an IC card at ¥200 a ride against ¥350 to 400 for everybody else, and since May 2024 several private lanes in Gion have been closed to visitors outright, signed with a fine of up to ¥10,000. A day built around being at the well-known places before eight and somewhere indoors at noon is not a trick played on the itinerary. It is the only version of Kyoto that still works.

Komodo

Indonesia has gone further and simply capped the number. Since April 2026 the South Padar visitor area admits 1,000 people a day, split across three timed sessions — 05:00 to 08:00, 08:00 to 11:00 and 15:00 to 18:00 — booked through the park’s digital system, on top of the IDR 700,000 park entry. A timed slot is not a ticket you can turn up and buy, which is why the seventeen-day Indonesia voyage fixes those sessions months out. Where a cap exists we book inside it and do not go looking for the operator who says he can get you round it.

Water, plastic, and the honest position on flying

Start with the part that does not flatter us. A long-haul flight from London, New York or Sydney to Asia is the largest single environmental cost of the holiday, and nothing we do on the ground offsets it. We will not tell you that a journey is carbon neutral, and we do not sell an offset at checkout, because the traveller who buys one has bought a feeling and not a tonne of anything.

Two working practices come out of that rather than a claim. The first is fewer, longer trips: the reason this company sells sixteen to twenty-eight day voyages at all is that one flight spread across three weeks is a different proposition from three flights spread across three years, and a longer journey is also the only shape in which the money reaches more than one town.

The second is that no internal flight goes into an itinerary where a train of about two hours exists. Vientiane to Luang Prabang is roughly two hours on the fast service against five to six and a half by road, with the caveat that both stations sit outside their towns and seats are genuinely hard to secure — they are booked well in advance and not on the morning. Tashkent to Samarkand on the Afrosiyob is about two and a half hours at 250 km/h. Tokyo to Kyoto is about two hours and a quarter on the Nozomi. In each case the flight would be shorter in the air and longer in total, and worse in every other respect.

Water and what you carry

Tap water is not drinkable across most of the region and the default answer has been a case of small plastic bottles in the boot of the car every morning. Ours is filtered water in a cooler in the vehicle and a refillable bottle each, topped up at the hotel, which over three weeks is the difference between a case of plastic in the boot every morning and none at all. Where a hotel cannot refill, we say so before you book rather than after.

Local charges belong in the same paragraph because travellers meet them as a nuisance rather than as policy. Bali levies IDR 150,000 on every arriving foreign visitor, cashless only, and we put it inside the quote so nobody is standing at a counter with the wrong card. Bhutan’s Sustainable Development Fee is USD 100 per adult per night, confirmed at that halved rate through 31 August 2027, and it is the most honest instrument of its kind in Asia: the country has priced itself deliberately rather than pretending volume can be managed with signage.

Photographs, and the three things travellers do without meaning to

Almost nobody sets out to behave badly with a camera. The damage is done by habits formed at home, in places where a lens is not an intrusion, carried into places where it is.

Photographing children. At home you would not photograph a stranger’s child; on a village road it feels different, and it is not. Where money or sweets change hands it is worse, because it teaches a child that a foreigner is an income and puts them on the road instead of at school.
Photographing people at prayer. A monastery at service, a mosque at prayer and a family at a shrine are not backdrops. The test is simple: if you would not stand in the aisle of your own church during a funeral with a lens up, do not do it here.
Assuming a nod is consent. A market trader smiling at a camera is being polite to a customer. Ask, in one word of the language, and accept the first answer; a guide who is with you for the whole journey rather than the morning will ask for you and will tell you honestly when the answer was no.

One rule covers the rest. If the picture requires you to move — into a line, onto a step, past a rope, closer than the person would stand to you — that movement is the problem and not the picture. Drones sit inside the same rule and outside the law in more places than travellers expect.

Tell us where you draw the line, and we will tell you where ours is

If something on this page rules out a journey you had in mind, say so in the first message and we will tell you plainly whether we can build it, redraw it, or should not be the ones to sell it to you.

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Common questions

Questions travellers ask most

Will you book an elephant sanctuary at all, or is it a blanket no?

Riding is a blanket no, anywhere, on any journey, including the short paid ride at the end of a temple visit. What we will book is a genuine observation-only place where the animals are not ridden, not chained during the day, not made to perform and not washed on demand by paying visitors, and where the herd is not being quietly restocked from elsewhere.

There are fewer of those than the signage suggests, the word sanctuary is not protected in any country we work in, and we will name the specific place in the quote rather than writing "ethical elephant experience" and leaving you to find out on the day.

Is visiting a poorer country at all a defensible thing to do?

That is your question to answer, not ours to answer for you. What we can tell you is where the money physically goes on one of our journeys: a driver and a guide engaged for the full trip, hotels that are named in the quote and mostly locally owned outside the big cities, entrance fees to state and municipal bodies, and meals bought in the towns you sleep in.

The uncomfortable part is that the flight is the largest line in the environmental account and no amount of ground-level good practice cancels it. We would rather write that down than sell you a carbon-neutral badge.

You refuse do-not-travel areas. Does that rule out whole countries we wanted?

It rules out Myanmar entirely for now, and it rules out named regions elsewhere rather than the countries containing them: highland Papua but not Raja Ampat, central and western Mindanao but not Palawan or the Visayas, Jammu and Kashmir and Manipur but not Rajasthan or Kerala, the 3 km strip along Jordan’s Syrian border but not Petra, Wadi Rum or Amman.

The levels move in both directions and we recheck them when we quote. The current position on each is on safety and advisories, and if a level changes between your deposit and your departure we will tell you before you have to ask.

How much of this actually changes the itinerary I would be sold?

Most of it changes the clock rather than the map. Angkor gets first light and late afternoon across separate days on a three-day pass rather than one long push; Kyoto gets its famous places before eight; Padar gets a session booked months ahead; the Vientiane to Luang Prabang leg is a train and not a flight. None of that shortens the list of things you see.

Where it does change the map, we say why in the proposal. If the honest answer is that the month you have chosen makes a place a bad idea, that argument belongs on when to go and you will get it before a deposit, not after.