G Adventures has become ChildSafe certified. The announcement was made at the World Travel Market this month in recognition of the work that G Adventures has undertaken and the demonstrable steps implemented with its non-profit partner, Planeterra, to ensure the safeguarding of children’s wellbeing across the business.
This comes after the June launch of a new set of child welfare guidelines (published by ChildSafe Movement, G Adventures and Planeterra) and will be followed by a new awareness-building consumer-facing campaign that will launch on November 20, Unicef World Children’s Day.
The new child welfare campaign aims to open the eyes of travellers who are well-intentioned but don’t realise that what they believe is helpful behaviour, such as visiting schools and taking selfies with children, can actually be harmful. It is accompanied by a shareable video that reinforces the message “if you wouldn’t do it here, don’t do it anywhere” regarding interacting with children while travelling.
Vice president of social enterprise and responsible travel at G Adventures, Jamie Sweeting, says the new guidelines are designed to encourage travel companies to do more, and to educate travellers, who often believe they are doing the right thing when interacting with children, to act responsibly.
“As a travel company we want to make sure we’re doing the best we can and these guidelines are helping us make appropriate changes internally. We’ve swept our digital assets and owned channels to ensure all our media complies, have removed all school classroom visits from our itineraries and have launched an internal training programme for all office and field staff,” says Jamie.
