Responsible tourism is not a separate part of Eternal Landscapes. It is how we make decisions.
It shapes who we work with, where we travel, how many guests we accept, how we pay our team, how we prepare travellers, and how we respond when things change for the families and communities we work alongside.
We are part of Mongolia’s tourism industry, and we know tourism brings both opportunity and pressure. It can provide income, confidence, training, connection, and support. But it can also create unrealistic expectations, add strain to fragile environments, concentrate money in too few places, and turn people’s lives into something staged for visitors.
We are a small company, working with around 200 travellers a year. We are not trying to grow quickly or send more people to more places. We are trying to work carefully, stay rooted in Mongolia, and make choices that feel fair to our team, our guests, our local partners, and the landscapes we travel through.
For us, responsible tourism is not about sounding good on a website. It is about the quieter decisions behind each journey: who benefits, who is listened to, who is paid properly, what pressure we create, what we leave behind, and whether our presence is useful.
This page explains how we try to put that into practice.
‘The responsible travel value is a true value to Eternal Landscapes and core to what you do. It is not merely a nice term which you just give lip service to. I do feel that our trip was low impact. If any impact was made, it is a positive, financial one to the local communities we passed through.’
Responsible tourism shapes the practical decisions behind each journey: which routes we offer, how often we return to the same families, when we travel, how we support our team, and how we respond to Mongolia’s changing social, environmental, and economic realities.
We try not to build journeys around the same overused routes or familiar highlights. Instead, we work across Mongolia through long-term local partnerships with families, community projects, cooperatives, national park staff, small businesses, and local organisations.
Our approach is based on a few simple principles:
We do not get everything right. But this approach helps us keep asking better questions.
Responsible tourism only matters if it changes how a company works.
For us, impact is not only about big projects or visible donations. It is also about the quieter decisions: where money goes, who benefits, how our team is supported, which partnerships we continue, and what we choose not to do.
Our annual Impact Reports help us look more honestly at this. They show where our income, time, support, and responsibilities go — and where we still have work to do.
Some of the areas we focus on include:
We see responsible tourism as a continuous process of learning and adapting. Progress matters more than perfection.
We created our Tourism Manifesto as a simple starting point for wider responsibility within tourism in Mongolia.
Mongolia’s tourism industry is growing, but growth alone does not guarantee that tourism will be fair, well managed, or good for the people and places involved. Some landscapes, festivals, wildlife habitats, and cultural experiences are already under pressure.
We do not yet know how to make this manifesto happen across the wider industry. But we believe it is worth putting the idea out there.
Mongolia’s landscapes should not simply be used as a backdrop for travel. They are lived places, shared by people, livestock, wildlife, water, weather, roads, and ecosystems. Tourism has a responsibility to care for that complexity.
B Corp certification is valuable, but it takes time, money, and administrative capacity that we do not currently have. As a very small company, we have chosen to focus our limited resources on our team, our local partners, and our annual Impact Reports. That may change in the future, but for now we would rather be honest about what we can manage.
Mongolia is immense — roughly the size of Western Europe — yet tourism here often follows the same fixed circuit, visiting a handful of highlights that face heavy pressure during peak season. Even in such a vast country, certain areas are beginning to show early signs of overtourism.
We cap our annual guests at just 200 people, travel mainly in the shoulder seasons, and limit our group sizes to a maximum of six. These small decisions make a big difference.
Our goal is for Mongolia’s landscapes and traditions to remain intact—not worn out. We know that travel has the power to disrupt as much as it can enrich, especially in communities already under pressure from urbanisation, technology, and resource exploitation. That’s why we never stage or request spectacles that our hosts wouldn’t customarily organise themselves.
Vehicles are part of the reality of travel in Mongolia. Outside Ulaanbaatar, there is not yet the charging infrastructure for us to use electric vehicles on rural journeys, and electric vehicles remain beyond the reach of most Mongolian drivers we work with.
For city transfers, we use hybrid vehicles where possible. For rural journeys, we rely on robust vehicles that can handle Mongolia’s roads, weather, and distances.
We are not currently publishing carbon measurements for our tours. Instead, we focus on what we can reduce now: avoiding unnecessary domestic flights, keeping groups small, planning routes carefully, sharing vehicles, and encouraging longer, slower journeys rather than short highlight-based trips.
We try to reduce single-use plastic wherever we can.
We do not buy pallets of small plastic water bottles for our trips. Instead, our vehicles carry refillable 20-litre water containers, and we encourage guests to bring reusable filtered bottles. We also offer Water-to-Go discount codes on such bottles.
This is not a perfect system. Waste infrastructure in Mongolia is limited, especially outside Ulaanbaatar. But reducing what we bring into rural areas is one practical step we can take.
At EL, we design our itineraries so that income reaches the people and projects connected to each journey — our Mongolian team, host families, drivers, local businesses, community partners, national park staff, and the projects we support.
We are careful not to treat local people’s lives as something to be fitted around our schedules. We keep our groups small, avoid overloading the same hosts, and try to make sure our visits feel manageable and worthwhile for the people welcoming us.
For us, helping local communities is not only about income. It is also about long-term relationships, fair payment, training, trust, and staying connected as people’s lives and circumstances change.
You can read more in our Impact Reports, where we share what we are learning, where our money and support go, and where we still have work to do.
