Ecotourism Principles at Community Tours Sian Ka'an

Community Tours Sian Ka'an maintains a true commitment to conducting ecologically sustainable practices by offering low-impact tours that:

Generate Income for Local Communities

Community Tours Sian Ka'an is a community-based company that arranges tours, employs local guides, and contracts with local hotels, restaurants, and other services to keep as much of the income generated by our business within our communities. Through a partnership between UNESCO, UNEP, the United Nations Foundation and Rare, training programs for nature guides and ecotourism promoters were conducted to build our communities' capacity for local ownership in the tourism sector of Sian Ka'an.

Link Tourism and Livelihood to Conservation

• We reduce the environmental impact of tourism by using environmentally-friendly transportation and designating sites of the reserve for tourism, so that impact is concentrated and minimal, while other parts of the reserve remain pristine and untouched.
• We integrate our tours into the reserve's Public Use and Management Plan, which is administered by Reserve staff. The Reserve staff partners with Community Tours Sian Ka'an often, as we share the common goal of conservation, and they are often included in the planning of Community Tours Sian Ka'an.
• We generate sustained funding for conservation by designating a percentage of revenue to local conservation efforts.
• We address threats to biological diversity by employing nature guides and tour operators, creating economic alternatives to environmentally-destructive activities such as hunting, logging, and extraction.
• We carefully monitor the social and ecological effects of our tours on a monthly basis in order to track our impact and make changes in our tours as needed.

Ensure Visitor Safety

We ensure that the guides of Community Tours Sian Ka'an are trained in first aid and in handling emergency situations. All of our guides are equipped to handle emergency situations and each carries emergency equipment at all times