Fast Company

Exquisite Safaris in Fast Company Magazine

">
Do-good travel doesn’t have to be a gritty exercise in banging nails into the side of a house or digging ditches. That’s textbook “voluntourism,” where travel is coupled with hard labor in support of a humanitarian cause.

Exquisite Safaris, on the other hand, is a private luxury tour company that creates the experience of your choice around the globe, and then shoehorns a humanitarian element into the trip. In between watching cheetahs on the plains of the Serengeti and getting pampered with spa treatments, you may spend a morning evaluating the impact an NGO is having on the community. He calls this “philanthropic travel,” defining it as a sojourn that safely exposes wealthier travelers to downtrodden places glossed over in guidebooks. Though time spent in the trenches can be minimal, participants are frequently transformed.

“We spent a week in the slums of Nairobi where we bought bags of rice and delivered them to orphanages, then we visited Tanzania where we saw 300,000 wildebeests,” says Tom Dowd, CEO of industrial chemical company Dowd and Guild Inc. Since his trip last fall, Dowd has made significant contributions to relief organizations.

That’s what philanthropic travel is all about: Leaving a place stronger than you found it -without the sweat investment.