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Our founder, Andrew Morten, shares how TravelEssence has spent 20 years developing a more sustainable way to travel – creating better experiences for travellers while supporting small businesses, local people, and the places they call home.
This is the story of our journey to establish a more sustainable travel model. One that focuses on small, locally run businesses in places you won't find in guidebooks. Set amongst landscapes kept in pristine condition. One that provides a better travel experience for our activity guides, our accommodation hosts and, of course, for you as our traveller. This is the story of why we do what we do, and how we do it.
Before I started TravelEssence, I surveyed 550 travellers to find out what sort of holidays they wanted. Sadly, people weren’t getting what they wanted.
People told me that when they booked via a normal travel agent or booking website, all they got were mass and mainstream – large properties and activities where they were treated as a number. Easily booked, cheap, but not the special personal experience they were looking for. Their holidays were often rushed and focused on ticking off the highlights found in the same guidebooks everyone was using.
What people said they wanted were holidays staying in untouched natural environments, close to the highlights but also far enough away. They wanted to slow down to enjoy nature in an unhurried way. They wanted to get to know the locals and stay in small-scale, comfortable places.
"They wanted an insider's travel experience versus a superficial, impersonal mass tourism holiday. A sort of slow travel-meets-fairtrade-meets-boutique comfort."
— Andrew Morten, CEO and founder of TravelEssence
As a New Zealander with lots of family and friends in Australia, I had travelled a lot around both countries. I’d been to places that were super beautiful yet weren’t on anyone's ‘bucket’ lists.
These are special places where people are welcomed as friends and shown around like locals. Local hosts who make the difference and help create long-lasting memories and friendships. I knew I could connect with the locals in regions away from the mainstream to bring travellers something fresh and new.
A whole journey full of special places and special people, at an unhurried pace with time to enjoy the places you are. So was born TravelEssence.
By dispersing people from the mass and mainstream out into the country and wider regions, the negative impacts of tourism are far less concentrated and can start to accumulate in a positive way.
The natural environment gains an economic value in a pristine and untouched state because this is what visitors are coming to see. Clean beaches and rivers. Native trees. Undisturbed mountains.
For local people who previously had to earn their living from exploiting nature, tourism provides a pathway to becoming protectors and caretakers of natural environments.
Being a nature guide or offering a unique place to stay is also a way for many people to have their own small business. Outside the cities, these owner-operated experiences and accommodations often bring nature to the fore and help nature by restoring wildlife habitat, giving new life to old buildings, replanting native trees, and cleaning up.
When 93% of tourism businesses are small or micro, it's critical that these small but wonderful options are presented to you as you are researching and arranging your travel. Otherwise they are just something people do ‘next time’. A missed chance for one and all.
"A key founding principle behind TravelEssence was to make small-scale tourism the new norm. And that meant inventing a totally new way of doing things."
— Andrew Morten, CEO and Founder of TravelEssence
I knew travel could be better and should be better. I didn’t like how others presented holidays through Australia and New Zealand. So, from day one I worked to create a system to directly offer hand-selected places to stay and things to do where you’re shown around and looked after by local people you are really happy to meet. People and places that get you much closer to the real Australia and New Zealand.
For us to be able to do this well meant inventing an entirely new system created to find, select, and work directly with small properties and activities. No middlemen. And we would work directly with our clients too. This way, we know what is available and what clients want so we can match everything perfectly.
As a bonus, because we have cut multiple middlemen and selected carefully after visiting many options, our clients enjoy greater quality and greater value for money.
Not only did I want to make our travellers happy, but I wanted to make the guides and accommodation hosts happy too.
We pay all of our hosts prior to your arrival and have done so since day one. We are well known around New Zealand and Australia and respected for this by our hosts. These are the people that look after you as our guest. In our experience, when they love working with us, they will take special care for you. They want you to tell us how wonderful it was with them so that they receive more clients from us.
I call this the positive virtuous circle.
Many of our properties are located in remote areas and enjoy amazing views over the surrounding landscapes. Some are nestled amongst native bush on river or lake edges. Quite a few are on the beachfront. Others are farm cottages with private walking tracks just for you. Many are in the mountains with few people around. Almost every property has places for you to sit and contemplate whilst taking in the wide views.
Your hosts love to share their environment with people who genuinely appreciate it, whilst looking after you in a way that is more like how friends look after each other. Compare this with a typical hotel or resort where you are a room number and a staff member is someone in a uniform asking what time you’re going to check out. Yes, you get a far better experience when you make it a local experience.
Long before it was fashionable, many of our accommodation hosts had fruit orchards and vegetable and herb gardens where you could freely collect from or where our hosts would gather from to prepare your meals.
Fresh and flavoursome, picked minutes ago. Many have chickens for fresh eggs. Many bake. And many make their own muesli, yoghurt, and preserves.
Our Australian host Cherie welcomes travellers to her 115-acre farm in Queensland’s Byfield Ranges. With a background in farming and veterinary care, she’s passionate about growing fresh produce, caring for the land and sharing her knowledge of farming, holistic health and nutrition with guests.
Whether it’s a glamping tent in the forest, a private retreat on the beach, or a walk along the coast to watch sea lions and penguins, our philosophy enables us to seek out, nurture and offer exceptional things that have taken us years to find and perfect.
Going small and local does not mean compromising on standards and comfort but actually improving them. Properties are often personal love affairs for the owners with the place where they live. Built with care and built to fit their environment, often hidden into the landscape, whether simple or luxurious.
We do plenty behind the scenes to help make sure you have the best possible experience, and our hosts value the head start this gives them. Knowing what our clients expect helps them do the best job they can to make sure your holiday is only amazing.
And it all works. From over 3000 reviews, our clients rate their holiday with us at an average of 9.5.
What we do to ensure your comfort and care:
We provide training to every property and activity we work with to help them understand exactly what our clients value, so they can best look after you.
We visit them and provide personal coaching to help them to get everything perfect.
We share client feedback to help them stay on top of the details that matter.
We have a series of training videos covering many aspects of what’s critical and what's nice to provide.
We encourage them to care for their area, their property, and themselves.
We encourage them to grow fruit, vegetables and herbs, buy local products, reduce plastic use, and eliminate single-serve packaging.
We give them a small biography of every guest so they can best prepare for your arrival.
"People often say their holiday with us was the best travel experience of their lives."
— Andrew Morten, CEO and Founder of TravelEssence
We have visited, inspected and hand-selected the properties we offer. Local tourism boards keep us up to date, our current hosts introduce their friends to us, and we are constantly on the road searching out the new and the wonderful.
We currently work with around 2000 properties and activities in Australia and New Zealand. Together with our sister company Little America, we now work directly with 3200 small businesses.
For many, we are the only travel company they will work with. They like our approach, our systems, and our clients the most. You’ll feel that when you travel as a TravelEssence client.
For many of our hosts and guides, we are their main or sole source of income, and our clients directly support around 10,000 jobs across four countries. Our model provides income diversification on farms and social contacts for those living in remote regions.
In many ways our model enables the economic and social benefits of tourism to spread widely into the local community and even produce many positive environmental outcomes.
Business owner Kate sees her role as more than welcoming visitors to her home of Tutukaka and showing them the underwater wonders of the Poor Knights Islands. As a kaitiaki, or guardian, she feels a responsibility to give back to the community too – creating opportunities for young local people to learn, grow and build careers in tourism, while helping them remain connected to the place they call home.
Visitors are very welcome in many regions. Low-impact, nature-focused travellers are critical for many rural communities and towns, and they are made to feel welcome.
Local markets, cafes, market gardens, wineries, and handicraft makers, to name just a few, all benefit when there is a strong visitor flow to lesser-known regions.
And this feels very different than when you’re just another walking wallet visiting yet another highlight in an over-visited city or resort town. Towns where the locals have been priced out of local accommodation and the streets are overrun day and night with tourists.
Or where large resorts of dubious design have blocked the locals from beaches, the coast or even their traditional lands.
Tourism and leisure is the world’s largest industry. When tourism represents circa 40% of a European citizen’s annual ‘Earth's Share’ in only four weeks of their year, then getting tourism right matters.
Tourism’s impact is just too big to keep doing it the wrong way.
"A widely dispersed tourism model is of critical social, environmental and economic importance."
— Andrew Morten, CEO and Founder of TravelEssence
A quick search shows that the airline industry contributes about 3% to global CO2 emissions. There is no denying that flying produces emissions. However, this is not the complete picture. Tourism provides incentives to preserve forests and employment for people that may otherwise engage in environmental destruction.
Travellers value wildlife and forests. So keeping forest habitat intact, cleaning up breeding grounds and replanting native trees so that birds and other animals have native habitat to live in gain an economic value through the visitor economy.
This is especially critical in developing countries. A very graphic example is when tourism was shut down during the Covid years, deforestation in many developing countries accelerated rapidly. This was called a ‘silent crisis’ as funding was slashed for ranger and wildlife services as they were often directly funded by visitors.
Moreover, people who earned their living from visitors resorted to logging or clear-felling land to grow crops to feed their families and provide heating fuel because their work in the tourism sector had come to a standstill.
Whilst we cannot eliminate the CO2 output from flying, we encourage our clients to fly in the most fuel-efficient planes, such as the Airbus A350, as they use circa 30% less fuel per passenger than a Boeing 747.
We proactively offer our clients new rental cars and small-scale properties and refuse to offer the default choice of large campervans. The fuel usage of cars is often one-third to one-half of what a large campervan uses.
Since 2019 we have engaged in extensive carbon offsetting, but it's an inexact and confusing subject because measurement of both the output and the offset are usually not standardised.
We support multiple CO2 reduction or substitution projects, often in Southeast Asia. For example, clean cookstoves to replace open fires. These clean cookstoves reduce fuel burn by circa 80%, meaning less environmental pollution and less environmental destruction. We also support clean energy projects in developing countries.
We have also held the highest Travelife audited certification since 2020. This covers our internal processes and footprint but also the choices we make for what we offer and how we work fairly and constructively with our 3200 owner-operated accommodation and activity providers.
Host Keith welcomes eco-conscious travellers to his lodge in Queensland’s Glass House Mountains, where caring for the environment and giving old things new life are central to the experience. His passion for upcycling can be seen throughout the property, including unique places to stay created from a restored church and railway carriage.
Back about 20 years ago, I conceptualised a system of creating an activity where tourism meets environmental restoration. I called it Restourism: restoration through tourism. Guests actively doing something meaningful for the place they had visited.
People who have travelled with TravelEssence have personally planted 10,000 trees in New Zealand. Working with local Māori in Te Urewera Rainforest, our clients have planted native trees, many of which live to around 1000 years old.
Planting native trees themselves – hands in the dirt. That’s what people said they wanted to do, and that is what over 1000 people did. Rolled up their sleeves and got their hands dirty planting trees. Different native species, many of which will grow for 1000 years.
Whilst many companies want people to spend less time with their clients, we actively encourage our travel specialists to spend more time with our clients. The more we understand our clients, the better your holiday. Our product and travel specialists spend time in our destinations experiencing first-hand what they recommend to each of our clients. The more we know about what we’re offering you, the better your holiday.
Our model sounds simple and that is what makes it complicated. Our team does the work that traditionally would be done by three middlemen. This gives you better value, higher quality and ensures we have total insight into everything we offer and every aspect of your journey.
That’s why we invested heavily in our own system to manage everything before, during and after your holiday. One seamless system for everyone. Whilst, after 20 years, we are pretty good at what we do, our team still improves our system every day because there is always something that can be a little better. Our endless pursuit of improvement means our clients', our suppliers' and our team's feedback is another chance to improve any aspect of what we do or what we offer.
After all, life is better for everyone when problems are solved before they can reoccur.
We don’t want to waste your precious holiday. We want to help create great memories that last forever.
Today, it's our first-hand direct knowledge of everything we offer, and the direct relationship we have with every single traveller, that means everyone gets exactly what they are looking for. Hosts receive clients who love where they are coming to, and every client has a holiday created just for them. Simple.
Investing time to talk about what each person wants in their travel experience takes a little time from you, and a little time from us. But it’s worth it for everyone. There is nothing worse than trying to fix the sadness of a holiday that wasn’t right.
This is sustainable travel, à la TravelEssence.