If you’ve been following the news, it’s been a summer of “bad tourists.” There was the woman who carved her initials into the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the drunk Brits, ahem, leaving their marks around Amsterdam. Of course, these are just the travelers who rise to the top—most people would never think of behaving this way on a trip. (Right??)

Still, it feels like the right time to explore a tool that’s trying to curb this bad behavior: the “travel better” pledge. If you haven’t heard of them, or signed one, essentially, a travel pledge is a promise that a traveler makes to follow a certain set of guidelines set out by the host community. Countries around the world, from Iceland to Palau, have launched pledges, which travelers can sign and share on social media. 

The idea is to encourage people to think more about a place and its vulnerabilities, its values, and its needs, before a visit. Some pledges require a fee, and the money is funneled towards a particular cause, while others offer volunteer opportunities or help visitors tap into the ethics of a place. But in the end, they’re just ... words. And how effective can those words be, really? 

That’s the question that AFAR deputy editor Tim Chester, our guide for this week’s episode, asked himself recently. Tim signed his first pledge last year, during a trip to an Indigenous community that has been highly impacted by the world. After returning home, he did a little digging and found that this pledge was part of a larger movement in travel. 

Meet this week’s guests

Resources

Be sure to subscribe to the show and to sign up for our podcast newsletter, Behind the Mic, where we share upcoming news and behind-the-scenes details of each episode. And explore our second podcast, Travel Tales, which celebrates first-person narratives about the way travel changes us.