Dear Immersa Global Friends and Family,
The year 2020 taught all of us many life-changing lessons. For a small travel company like ours, it forced us to stop focusing on growth (when the world stopped traveling), and (re)focus on what really counted: our friends and family, our communities, and our planet.
As we reevaluated every aspect of our organization, we realized that we were already doing things that were important to us such as:
· Supporting small local (preferably female-owned) businesses;
· Spending over 85% of product costs in local communities;
· Encouraging clients to shop locally in each city and town with the support of the curated IG Gift Guide;
· Creating opportunities for higher ROI for suppliers and tour guides by contracting with them directly;
· Stimulating growth in rural areas by including them in our upscale travel programs;
· Using the Immersa Global platform to support local businesses amongst affluent expats within the destination; and
· Donating hundreds of hours annually as event speakers and mentors to local universities, non-profits, and business organizations.
We are proud of our achievements, but we’re also aware that there’s still so much more that we can do. And fortunately, we have the perfect allies to help us: our local suppliers in Portugal.
Therefore, starting this spring, as we undergo the procurement process for 2022, we’re asking each of our suppliers to join us on our new mission: IG for Good.
We’ll find out exactly what each of our hotel, restaurant, winery, and tourist attraction partners are doing to achieve the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We’ll learn about their short and long-term objectives as well as how they’re benchmarking their progress and measuring their results.
We’ll engage in a similar process with our sustainability-minded clients. Prior to designing their tailor-made travel programs, we’ll ask them to share with us the specific SDGs that are most valuable to them. We’ll then use that information to design travel programs by selecting suppliers whose sustainability goals align with those of our clients.
This could be recommending a restaurant that donates their leftover meals to local food banks as they work towards “Zero Hunger” (goal number two) or by booking a hotel for clients in rural Alentejo that supports local schools in their community as they work towards “Quality Education” (goal number four).
We are aware that this is an ambitious move for such a small tour operator like Immersa Global, especially following an extremely difficult year like 2020. In addition to extra resources, operating IG for Good will require getting to know our supplier partners and clients at a much deeper level than we ever have before.
But we’re ready for the challenge.
Because if there’s anything that we learned in 2020, it’s that we are truly all in this together.
Wish us luck on this exciting new journey.
President & Founder
