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14 February 2010 - Charitable Tourism
All the hard work has been taken out of charitable tourism, writes Jane E. Fraser.
(Sun Herald - 14/2/2010)
Here's the deal: you get to lie on a beach or spend your holiday dining and shopping while someone else gives money to a charity on your behalf. No, there's not a catch. Welcome to a new era of charitable tourism, where you can do good wihtout giving up your well-earned break.
Launched this week, Holidays for a Good Cause (holidaysforagoodcause.com.au) is a website that offers cheap accommodation to consumers while donating the proceeds of bookings to selected charities.
The site is the brainchild of the LeisureCom Travel Group, a major provider of online travel bookings in the Australian market, and expects to raise thousands of dollars a day for charities including the Starlight Children's Foundation, Australia Zoo's Wildlife Warriors, the Red Cross and the Fred Hollows Foundation.
LeisureCom collects a service fee to cover
call-centre and transaction costs, then donates
the remainder of the commission - 5 per cent
of the total booking amount - to a charity
selected by the traveller.
For example, a week-long stay in a Queensland resort might amount to $1500, of which $75 would go to charity - a passive donation on the part of the traveller."It is purely charitable, we only take out the cost of the transaction," the managing director of LeisureCom, Shaun Keddie, says. "There will be thousands of dollars a day, easily [going to charity]:" Prices on the Holidays for a Good Cause website compare favourably to other discount travel websites and Keddie says the site will not knowingly be undersold.
In many cases, it may be able to undercut
other websites by negotiating promotional rates
with accommodation providers. On a standard
supply basis, they [accommodation providers]
won't be undercut but on a promotional basis
they're happy to give us special offers," he says.
The launch of the Holidays for a Good Cause
website marks a new chapter in a rapidly
growing and changing sector.
A decade ago, charitable tourism was very much a niche, provided for by a small number of adventure-travel operators and otherwise the domain of service clubs and individual charities.
