by Vaila Erin Bhaumick

The experience of being in a different place and opening one’s senses to what’s there is at the heart of connecting with, rather than dissociating from, global issues. But how does one become a good global citizen whilst travelling the world? We spoke to Eliza Raymond, co-founder of New Zealand-based sustainable and responsible travel company GOOD Travel, to gain some insights.

It began in Frankfurt, packing frankfurters. During her first independent travel experience, long shifts spent on the factory floor alongside colleagues from around the globe gave 18-year-old Eliza Raymond a glimpse of lives extremely different to her own. And yet the communion with the other workers, the sharing of stories to stay motivated through the night while packing sausages, highlighted a human connection that was hard to forget. “The people I worked with at that factory transformed the way I understood ‘difference’ and cultivated my deep respect and appreciation for diversity,” Eliza said.

An early seed in the creation of GOOD Travel, the experience in Frankfurt sparked curiosity in a young Eliza to travel more and, in doing so, help others along the way. Admittedly, she fell into the volunteer tourism trap. When she found herself volunteering in a Guatemalan orphanage on her gap year, however, she had something of a lightbulb moment. “I was asked to sort through a container of goods that had been donated to the orphanage from the United States. In the container I found a pair of skis. I realised in that moment that I was just like those skis: very well intentioned, but of little value in the context of an orphanage in the jungle of Guatemala,” she said.

Wishing to be able to think more critically about how to volunteer and travel, Eliza spent most of the next decade dedicated to both researching and working in volunteer tourism. She ultimately decided to advocate against it, and especially against volunteering in orphanages. According to a recent research 80% of children growing up in these types of facilities have one or more living parents and volunteer tourism creates a demand for orphanages in the Global South. “By volunteering, I caused harm by helping to finance orphanages when I could have invested my time and money into supporting child protection organisations that were seeking to reunite children with their families or find them long-term homes,” she said. Doing harm was not something she wanted to be a part of. Instead, something good should come out of it.

Cut to Peru, a few years later, where a few Pisco Sours helped birth GOOD Travel. The restaurant where said Pisco Sours were merrily consumed was a local non-profit organisation that funded important work with marginalised youth and their families. Now, we all have fantastic business ideas when we’ve had one too many cocktails, but this one was truly good.

Coinciding with a shift in the tourist industry towards more conscious spending, it seemed like Eliza and her co-founders Caitie Goddard, Heidy Aspilcueta and Shelley Bragg had hit on something. Eliza recalls her thinking at the time GOOD Travel was born: “Travellers were wanting to have a positive impact, but many of them (just like me, aged 18 in Guatemala) didn’t know how to be GOOD travellers.”

Eliza and her co-founders believed that if they could make it easier for travellers to have a positive impact on their destinations, then they could transform the tourism industry into a force for good. “We launched our first trip to Peru—a GOOD food trip—in 2014, and we’ve grown and expanded our work from there,” she said.

Along with a truly international and talented team of women, Eliza has realised her dream. GOOD Travel is, in Eliza’s eyes, about transformation, our inescapable interconnectedness and, above all, responsibility.

Her inspiring commitment to responsible travel is unending: as well as the Commitment to GOOD and Annual Impact Reports that are integral to the business, GOOD Travel is developing a Partner Commitment to GOOD which will facilitate learning around responsible practice between the company and local partners. A research partnership with Dr Julia Albrecht, senior lecturer at the department of Tourism of the University of Otago, New Zealand, has increased understanding around destination pledges—a promise that visitors make to act responsibly in their destination of choice. And finally, Eliza is currently researching a PhD into how travel in childhood shapes children’s sense of global citizenship.

Eliza is also a mum. She has a four-year-old daughter, named Emma, who at four months had already become a GOOD traveller—Emma ‘co-led’ a Fiji trip with mum and was welcomed as an honorary delegate at a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) event. Eliza has felt empowered by these experiences through which her daughter can see global citizenship first hand. GOOD Travel’s commitment to equality evidences itself, from the all-female team to its support of NGOs like Peruvian Hearts, a charitable organisation that promotes girls’ education in Peru, to advocacy work on gender equality and mother and daughter trip offerings. 

The future for GOOD Travel isn’t more destinations. Eliza gave a definitive “No” when asked if her team was planning to expand into more countries. Their well-established and cultivated relationships with partners in Peru, Fiji, Iceland, Thailand and New Zealand must be allowed to deepen and become more meaningful over time. “By focusing on these places and these partners, we can streamline our efforts to support their initiatives and to craft a series of memorable and transformative itineraries for our travellers,” she said.

Rather than expand their offerings, she believes that investing more into research could be a catalyst for change in the tourism industry, and the key to leaving another legacy—a healthier planet—for her daughter and future generations. Eliza believes that the most powerful way to help people really understand the urgency of addressing climate change is to spend time getting to know the people already experiencing its adverse effects.

Just as it was back then, sharing stories on a factory floor in Frankfurt, the ability to understand current global issues that surround us is more powerful through human connection and visceral moments. From afar it is too easy to dissociate. Responsible travel is the story that will motivate us through the night.

@travellinggood