100% Charitable? To which charities?
Feel good about yourself and even better about your holiday; booking direct with the hotel through us supports a worthy local charity.
Travel Ethos is 100% charitable regarding its direct hotel / villa earnings. That is; anything and everything we earn directly from the hotels and villas we have paid to a local charity (see below for details of these charities). We do still earn money ourselves from any bookings users of this site make with our affiliate partner wholesaler, Hotel Club (Flairview Travel Pty Ltd of Australia); this we use for the operation and administration of our web sites so you are still doing some good even when you book using Hotel Club’s services. Users of this site will know when they are making a direct reservation which earns local charities money Vs. Hotel Club which pays for the upkeep of this site as this is clearly marked.
Why do we even use Hotel Club for certain hotels?
Unfortunately some hotels do not work with direct reservation sites such as our own directly as the volume of business we offer does not justify their setting up an operational and accounting system to facilitate it. You will find some hotels on our site offer you the choice of both direct reservations through us or wholesale travel agent bookings; often (but not always) the later is lower in price because Hotel Club enjoy volume discounts. Please see our Direct Reservations page for more details.
The charities we and you support are below. We have chosen the charities very carefully as unfortunately so many are operated for selfish individuals’ financial and sociopolitical gain, not fully and truly for the deserving causes as they claim. Many registered charities in fact distribute donations to other charities after “costs”; the later part being very poignant. Our focus has been on helping children escape poverty and with it the resultant abuses such as being sold into the rampant child sex trade (e.g. the UNHCR labels Bali as a black spot for this, see UNHCR Report) which in some areas is actually run or protected by corrupt local police.
The charities we and you support:
1) The Bali Children’s Project
The Bali Children’s Project was chosen because of its ethos of “Escaping Poverty Through Education” and because it is an honest, feet and ears to the ground direct operation. We first became aware of The Bali Children’s Project in 2004 when one of the founders of the charity Dr. John Cooke who had his two private villas in Bali on our reservations site unselfishly turned them over for the charity to use rather than to make him money. This is indeed a very rare and generous act by someone and clearly shows the Bali Children’s Project is about helping needy Balinese kids, not pockets or egos.
2) The Human Development Foundation - Mercy Centre (Thailand)
The Human Development Foundation - Mercy Centre works to help the children and communities in the slums of Bangkok. In their Mercy Centre they have five loving homes for orphaned and abandoned children, and for children living with HIV/AIDS. Throughout the city, they operate 30 slum preschools and provide ongoing educational assistance for over one thousand of the very poorest children through primary and secondary schools, vocational college, and university. They protect poor children in grave danger, and give these children a future outside street life, child labour, and the sex industry. They are a "house of faith" that embraces all religions among Thailand's poor - Catholic, Buddhist and Muslim. This is a hands-on labour of love charity that makes good and proper use of every cent/penny they receive in donations.