Change Around the World: Interview with Victoria Smith

By Mollie Semple

I spoke with Victoria Smith on a sunny Friday afternoon through Skype, as with most interactions during the days of Covid19. Victoria founded the website Earth Changers (https://www.earth-changers.com/earth-changers) to enable people to connect with sustainable tourism companies whenever they wanted to travel. It is a service dedicated to eco-tourism and changing the way that travel impacts the world. On their website they comprehensively state that “Earth Changers highlights the most sustainable tourism around the world, engages with the people behind the places to reveal their true passions and purpose, and educate on the issues.” Victoria has dedicated her work to raising awareness about eco-tourism and ensuring that her company values “quality over quantity for purpose before profit, to put Earth first.” Victoria’s work extends to almost all 17 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and it was truly a pleasure to talk to her and learn more about what she does.

How did your passion for eco-tourism come about?

I have worked in travel since university, which is now 25 years. I got involved in travel initially managing destinations for a tour operator and then I got involved in web development. And then through working for the mass market, I experienced what mass market travel industry does to destinations. I was quite horrified when I came to realise that and I also realised the importance of travel and tourism, for potential positive impact.

I didn't want to work in the mass market that was destroying places and ignoring culture. I went on a personal holiday to Kenya to a friend's wedding. I got a cheap deal for an all inclusive through work. I worked at the time for Teletext, transferring their service from analogue TV to digital. It was my first time going to Africa. So I was quite excited about a Safari and in the culture difference, I didn't quite know what to expect. And then I just was so shocked. There was this all inclusive, and it could have been anywhere in the world. And it's literally I went around the pool actually researching and asking people what they were doing there. And you know why and how they, how they booked all this kind of stuff. And they were literally just eating and drinking and tanning as much as they could. The vast majority of them booked through Teletext because that way you got last minute deals, and they didn't care where they were.

The first thing that shocked me was coming from the airport, the amount of plastic in the streets. Now that wasn't Kenya's fault. They just didn't have the capacity to deal with waste and the infrastructure required. When we got to the hotel, the staff were telling guests not to go outside and talk to people, not to talk to people not to go to the beach, not to go to the bars, they just wanted them to stay in this all inclusive.

I just decided this isn't what travel is about. It was then that I came into responsible tourism and learned what responsible choice was and realised, well, that's what I want to be. And I don't want to be in this mass market crazy world that does this, basically.

And so, Earth Changers was born from that?

Yeah. I worked for commercial companies, which then weren't sustainable enough. And then I worked for charities, they're more sustainable, but they had no idea about market requirements In sustainability, in travel, you've got to know how the travel industry works.

My experience was that there never seemed to be an organisation that was balanced between being purpose driven and using commercial business and techniques in order to deliver that. And so I thought, you know what I started myself eventually, that's how changes came to be, slightly precipitated by the fact that I had a ski injury. I bust my knee and I had to have reconstruction surgery. I had to bail out with my freelance projects, because most of them involve travel and I wasn't going to be able to go anywhere for 11 months. And I thought, what can I do for 11 months at home, I can sit and do some random dead end online job or now's the time. I had wanted to start my own site since 2006. I thought I’ll do it for a year and I’ll see what happens and it’s kind of taken on a life of its own.

What does Earth Changers do?

When I first thought I'd start a website, I thought it would be around volunteer tourism, and then through studying that with my MA and what I wrote about there, which got published and got a lot of acclaim for that. Basically 95% of that market is shocking. It is highly irresponsible. I didn't want to be involved in that but there's no way you can serve 5% of the market and be viable. So I knew I would have to do something wider in sustainable tourism but I don't want to be involved in a lot of greenwashing stuff. Most of the platforms that have come out for responsible tourism will have to dilute the level of sustainability in order to be viable enough. And so I didn't want to do that. I wanted to have a high standard of sustainability. Even if that means I have to go get another job.

How does your work tie in with the UN’s SDGs?

I mean, you've got all sort of impacts around the SDGs. Any one of those things can be positive impact but, obviously, you can quantify those all together. You can have tourism operations which just try to minimise negative impacts. That might be water waste, energy, staff being paid well. Tourism isn't really a product in itself. It's a mixture of all these different styles.

I wanted to create a site which explained all this because I felt the education wasn't out there. The main thing in tourism, in getting people to buy into it, is trust, and people aren't going to trust what they don't understand. I always knew that I needed to educate a lot and engage people a lot o begin with. That's kind of where I'm at really now and then almost monetize that afterwards. That's sort of my primary cause.