What have we done to make a difference in 2025?

It’s a time of year for reflection and to ask ourselves what we have contributed to the world beyond our regular business activities. Our ongoing aim at RAW Travel has been to provide support to local communities and our charity partners, and undertake pro-nature actions that provide tangible, measured outcomes at the same time as we assess how to reduce our environmental impacts going forward.

We are proud to continue our support of the Women’s Spirit Project, a local charity that is focused on inspiring and empowering women experiencing disadvantage to transform their lives, through walking events and mentoring programs. We love this organisation, the wonderful women who are part of it and the outcomes they produce each year: helping more women find strength, community and joy through walking.

As a business that has nature at its heart, we have to ask ourselves how we can, in turn, give something back to nature for what we take? The answer to date has been regeneration: We have planted many thousands of native trees with local organisations. Close to home, our staff have planted trees with the Mornington Peninsula Koala Conservation, providing habitat and corridors for local wildlife. We’ve also introduced carbon labels to estimate how much carbon is produced by our trips each year, and then translated that tonnage into the equivalent amount of payments for further trees being planted in Gippsland, Victoria through Greenfleet. We feel that the tree planting is an effective way to protect our native forests and wildlife and account for the impacts of travel that we promote and organise. No scheme is perfect, but for now it’s one of the most tangible measurable actions we can take.

This year, we also got involved with promoting David Attenborough’s film ‘Ocean’ and continued to play a small part in cleaning up our oceans through Cleanhub. Each year we pay for 5,000kg of plastic waste to be collected and recycled in Indonesia before it impacts our shared oceans.

In 2025, we continued our long-standing commitment to KIVA, providing micro-credit loans to people in developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region. This year, we celebrated International Women’s Day by our staff donating matched loans to women across the region. It’s a small way to share the wealth that we enjoy in our society in a targeted way that allows people to enact their own plans and dreams and become self-sufficient in their communities.

Another small innovation has been our litter bags for our customers: Inspired by what we saw on the Everest Base Camp trek, where hikers voluntarily help bring out plastic waste (their own and others) in bags tied on their packs, we have introduced dry bags for our hikers to carry their own litter and, where possible, to remove any other visible litter along the trails they walk. It’s an easy way we can all contribute to keeping the trails we all love free from unsightly waste and encourage an example of environmental care to other hikers we meet. These ultra-lightweight bags are now included with all our info packs for our departing travellers.

2025 has also been the year in which we renewed our B-Corp certification and once verified that will bring us to our seventh full year of membership. When we certified in 2019, we were the first hiking company worldwide, but since that time we have been joined by several others. We regard this as great news for our industry as it means more companies seek to elevate their positive impacts and take into account all aspects of their operations.

We look forward to extending our impact in 2026 and bringing our customers into the journey by giving you a choice on where we direct these charitable funds.