GetYourGuide Faces Animal Rights Activists Over Travel Listings

24.09.2024 - 19:57 / skift.com / Sean Oneill

GetYourGuide, an online travel agency for tours, activities, and experiences, has been the target of ongoing protests by World Animal Protection, an activist group.

The company’s co-founder was speaking at the Skift Global Forum in New York City last week, and over a dozen protesters from the group stood outside the venue and handed out pamphlets to raise awareness. World Animal Protection says GetYourGuide lets operators list tourism activities that harm animals and published a report about the issue in June.

A spokesperson from GetYourGuide pointed Skift to the responsible tourism guidelines for product evaluation it has posted online and to a statement it issued in June: “GetYourGuide consistently requires suppliers to have the right insurance and safety protocols and removes activities that do not align with our policies. We continually evolve our standards and processes for experiences that fail to comply with our policies and continue to review experiences.”

World Animal Protection said that Airbnb, Expedia, and Booking.com stopped selling tickets to captive wildlife entertainment venues after working with it to create animal welfare policies.

“Prior to our first public protest, in Berlin in the spring this past year, we tried to work with GetYourGuide behind the scenes for about two years,” said Liz Cabrera Holtz, senior campaigns manager in the U.S. for World Animal Protection. “But the company didn’t engage in meaningful conversation. They’ve now blocked our emails, and we are not in dialogue.”

“They are continuing to sell some of the cruelest animal venues in the world, and they continue to offer abusive and endangered and dangerous experiences with wild animals,” Holtz said. “Today, there was a new listing for elephant riding in India,which is about one of the cruelest experiences you can purchase in terms of wildlife exploitation.”

Skift has previously examined the issue of elephant tourism.

Regenerative tourism represents an opportunity for the industry to respond to clear market demand and develop new approaches to sustainability and innovative business models. But it suffers from a lack of defined methodologies and defensible data and risks being a distraction from the core mission of climate action.