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 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 behaviors 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 prioritize 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. Behavior: animals should be provided with an engaging environment that enables natural behaviors, including socializing, exploring, playing, exercising freely, and any other natural behavioral 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 prioritize 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.