Policies

Our policies help guarantee high standards when it comes to responsible travel and sustainability across the business, including in our offices and destinations.

Responsible Travel & sustainability policy

Our policy outlines our sustainability efforts in all departments. Challenging but achievable, it works as a living document for our business, ensuring we keep sustainability and responsible travel at the forefront of everything we do. Each year, we’ll update the policy to make sure we maintain and improve our standards.

• Read our Audley Travel Sustainability Policy 2024 (download as .pdf)

Modern Slavery Act statement

We’re committed to respecting and supporting human rights throughout our operations. We firmly adhere to the principles of ethical travel, as set out in our Responsible Travel Policy and as reflected in the conduct of our business dealings and relationships with our business partners.

We’re committed to taking steps to ensure that slavery and human trafficking does not occur within our business or partners, in accordance with the Modern Slavery Act 2015.

• Read our Audley Travel Group Modern Slavery Statement

Our approach to child welfare

Our approach to child welfare is grounded in our commitment to safeguarding children’s rights, well-being, and dignity across all destinations we offer. Our child welfare policy was first developed in 2021, drawing on guidelines produced by the ChildSafe Movement, Friends International, the United Nations, and other industry stakeholders.

Our view is that visits to schools or other child-related institutions can unintentionally position children as attractions. For this reason, we don’t include these types of visits in our trips. We also believe that what we do at home should guide how we interact with children abroad. It would be inappropriate to take photos of children or offer them gifts in our own countries, so it’s equally important to respect those boundaries in other countries.

In 2025, we broadened the scope of our policy to apply these principles to all residential childcare establishments. Additionally, we clarified that any short-term or direct interactions with children should be discouraged, including voluntourism, gift-giving, and community visits. Instead, we suggest supporting reputable organisations that benefit the community.

Our approach to animal welfare

Travel experiences with animals can be enriching and help support conservation and local livelihoods when managed responsibly, and we’re committed to ensuring that none of the experiences we offer compromise animal welfare.

We created and continually review our animal welfare policies in line with industry best practice and the latest research to ensure your trip doesn’t have a detrimental effect on the welfare of working, captive, or wild animals. With support from experts at ANIMONDIAL, we have extensively reviewed our experiences that involve animals, which has included phasing out experiences that don’t meet our animal welfare standards, as well as introducing more ethical alternatives.

Following our most recent policy update in 2025, supported by consultant guidance, we’re phasing out activities previously considered high-risk, which are now widely seen as unacceptable. This includes performances with animals that rely on unnatural behaviours or harmful training methods. It also encompasses any physical interactions with wild animals in which the animal can’t freely choose to disengage or where the interaction doesn’t support its welfare.

At a minimum, we seek to offer experiences that prioritise animal welfare over commercial gain or human enjoyment. All our experiences involving captive and working animals must meet the Five Domains of Animal Welfare, which are:

1. Nutrition: animals should be given unrestricted and daily access to an adequate amount of quality food and clean drinking water, in line with their species-specific needs.
2. Environment: animals should be kept in clean, comfortable, and well-maintained surroundings at a suitable temperature, with sufficient space and ventilation, the ability to seek refuge and privacy, and freedom from excessive artificial noise.
3. Physical health: animals should enjoy an absence of disease, injury, and pain caused by management procedures, as well as an opportunity to maintain good fitness levels.
4. Behaviour: animals should be provided with an engaging environment that enables natural behaviours, including socialising, exploring, playing, exercising freely, and any other natural behavioural expression.
5. Mental state: by adhering to the first four domains, animals should experience a predominantly positive mental state, including security, contentment, reward, playfulness, vitality, affectionate companionability, and so on.

As well as meeting the above criteria, we aim to prioritise experiences that have an actively positive impact on the individual animals or the species as a whole. For example, this could be experiences where proceeds directly benefit local conservation and biodiversity efforts, as well as the proactive protection of endangered species.