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Social and Environmental Responsibility

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About Altezza About Altezza

Altezza Travel - Lasting Social and Environmental Impact

Tanzania is not just where we do business - it is our home. We live and work here.

This is the reason why Altezza Travel is committed to leave a lasting impact in this developing nation. Our initiatives to care for and protect the beautiful wildlife of Tanzania include:

Serengeti De-snaring project

In partnership with other tour companies, Altezza joined the Serengeti De-snaring project in 2018. Led by Frankfurt Zoological Society, this project focuses on cleaning Serengeti National Park from snares and traps that kill thousands of animals every year. Over 48,000 (!) snares have been removed from Serengeti during three years since the implementation of the project. Many captured animals were released back into the wild alive.

Today, three appointed teams patrol the park areas in search of snares and poachers. To fund their operations, we send USD5 from each tour booked by our travellers to the project team account. Your trip with Altezza means a direct contribution to fighting poaching and protecting Serengeti’s wildlife.

In October 2020 only the project team completed the following:

  • • Removed 5049 snares
  • • Destroyed four poacher camps
  • • Arrested four poachers
  • • 152 animals were found dead in snares
  • • 83 animals were released alive

Porters welfare treatment

Porters are the backbone of each Kilimanjaro expedition, they ensure that your adventure is comfortable and safe. They carry all heavy items and equipment up the mountain. The vast majority of porters are from the rural areas of Tanzania, where opportunities for employment are limited. Their job is tough and demanding, but we spare no effort in creating good working conditions for them. Apart from a higher salary rate than average for the industry, our porters receive extra bonuses for good performance. We equip our teams with high-quality tents, sleeping bags and other gear to ensure their health and safety on Kilimanjaro. Three meals a day are served to the crew to keep their stamina and strength high.

Safety of our climbing teams is paramount at Altezza. For that reason, all members of our climbing teams - guides, porters, camp masters with no exception - are subject to obligatory daily health checks. This is a highly important matter for us, and here we make no difference between the most VIP client and the last porter in our camping crew. All procedures are standard and the same for all members of the team. Once the Wilderness First Responders finish checking up the clients, a check for all members of our climbing support crew follows.

Besides, if some of our crew members get sick on the way, the same evacuation procedure applies - we provide them with a trained specialist to accompany or carry them down the mountain. In severe cases a helicopter evacuation flight is organized by our ground support team.

The most committed porters are also eligible for guide training and courses and promotions.

Eco-activism

Our climbing base and hotel Aishi Machame is located in a picturesque nook of Kilimanjaro region - Machame village. It is not just our office. It is the core of Altezza Travel’s operation. Machame has become our home – besides a good part of our extensive team being the natives of Machame and the surrounding villages, we, managers who fell in love with this country back in 2012, have lived here ourselves for about ten years now.

Machame is full of greenery; the surrounding plantations are cropped with banana palms and corn, and at dawn and sunset the most beautiful view of Kilimanjaro can be spotted from here. Unfortunately, on our way to work every morning we and our staff members see many drivers throwing garbage out of their car windows, which makes the roadside unsightly piled with empty bottles, newspaper scraps and food packaging.Not only it spoils the beauty of the village we love, but also poses a tangible threat to the health of the living world around us. 

We can't let our home turn into a waste bin. Recently, the Altezza Travel managers’ team launched weekly clean-up days which gather those of our team who are concerned about and conscious of keeping the world clean. We cleared the entire roadside from our hotel to the turnoff to the main highway - about 5 km in total. Just one morning and our home got so much cleaner!

We have also ordered a few billboards, which we plan to install along the road leading to the village. This way we hope to draw drivers’ attention to the need to keep Machame and other villages clean. 

In Machame, birds twitter and blue monkeys play in the lush greenery, and in the twilight mongooses rustle in the tall grass in the fields along the road. Our hotel Aishi Machame became a home to a family of blue monkeys - their babies amuse themselves swinging in the branches of a giant ficus tree in our garden. The gorgeous hornbills come flying to try ficus tree fruits, and squirrels and civets sneak into the restaurant garden.

We want to keep it as it is! And that's another reason why we use roadside billboards to ask drivers to slow down at dusk and at nighttime so that the headlights don't blind the tiny animals crossing the road, and the rushing wheels don't cause death to the diverse wildlife that we strive to conserve.

Job opportunities for local people

Altezza is proud to provide employment to over 1500 guiding professionals and 100 members of our hotel and office teams. We are also happy to see that every year more and more people join Altezza, and that our company has gradually become a coveted place to work for both seasoned professionals and young graduates.

We are an equal opportunity employer - the workforce in Tanzania is very diverse, and anyone can apply for our job openings. People of different faiths, religions and backgrounds are working for us. We are also proud to be the female-majority staff.

Altezza Travel is a good place to start a career in tourism - tourism is one of the most lucrative industries in Tanzania. Entering this market, however, is often a challenge for young people. The competition is very tough, and getting an entry-level position is becoming more and more difficult every year.

Here at Altezza Travel we always keep our doors open for fresh graduates and career-switchers. We are more interested in motivation and commitment than skills and education. In fact, the majority of our diverse office team came from other fields, such as finance, law and education.

To make sure that we remain competitive, Altezza Travel provides ongoing training to our staff members. All members of our operations team have their individual training plans, which we regularly review and update. We also have a good business library, and our office is an excellent place to learn about software, which is used by the leading international travel companies. We happily share these things with our team members and grow together.

Long-term, this is how Altezza will make a lasting difference in Tanzania: supporting wildlife initiatives, protecting injured animals, supporting the education of the next generation and valuing our local staff. Conserving natural resources as well as helping the local workforce to succeed and grow are some of the key values that drive Altezza Travel. Choosing Altezza directly supports these initiatives towards positive social impact for a better Tanzania.


Published on 5 August 2023 Revised on 24 September 2024
About this article
Anatolii Foksha
Expert Articles: 19
Written byAnatolii Foksha
Travel Expert Tanzania
Expertise:
Climbing Climbing
History History
Tanzania Tanzania
Islands Islands

Anatolii, a manager at Altezza Travel, has been with our company from the start. Since 2014, he also called Tanzania home. In his role, he takes part in organizing high-profile projects, such as the Wings of Kilimanjaro and Nimsdai Kilimanjaro climbs, among others. Anatolii has climbed Kilimanjaro numerous times and explored various regions of Tanzania. In our blog, he covers the news of our company and other related topics. As a passionate reader and explorer, he occasionally writes articles on Tanzanian history, geography, and culture.

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