Then Different Travel is what you are looking for!

At its simplest, a challenge works by setting an individual or a group of people a physical and challenging task – such as a fundraising trek up Kilimanjaro, an Everest expedition or charity bike ride – and those who accept the physical challenge then raise funds through sponsorship to cover the operating costs of the challenge, as well as raising funds for their chosen charity too.

However the market for challenges has increasingly become 'saturated'. People are starting to resent what they see as 'paying for someone's free holiday'. Charities are looking for ways to differentiate their challenge from others, to maintain the appeal of the challenge, and the motivation of the participant and the sponsor.

What is different about Different Travel?

We are different because our challenges do not just simply raise funds for home-based charities, but they also have a direct positive benefit to the community overseas well.

In short, everyone wins!

So, for example, a participant might ‘get handy in the Andes’ by trekking the Inca Trail in Peru and seeing the amazing sights of Machu Picchu, but instead of just heading home afterwards, you then get set to work helping with essential refurbishments on a local school.

Further to this, as we always try to work with local people, the porters we use on our Inca Trail trek are likely to be amongst the parents of the children whose school you will be re-furbishing.

So, with our challenges, you get to build great teamwork, see amazing places, do amazing things, and help amazing people – at home and abroad.

Plus, with our responsible travel ethos and ethical tourism and carbon neutral policies you know your challenge will be a force for good to add value to and benefit the local economy as well as minimising any negative side effects of travel on the global environment.

How does it work?

It is a simple concept. We offer you a range of fundraising challenge expeditions which ensure that at least 50% of the challenge is achieving an objective of benefit to a local community. These challenges are both open (pre-set departure dates and open to all charities to market), or tailor-made according to your own particular needs/preferred dates/location etc.

But what makes our charity challenges really different is that:

• Helping the local community is a central aspect of the challenge, not just an ‘incidental’.


• Our challenges are ethical because our responsible tourism ethos and policy ensures we only work with people we know treat their staff with respect and dignity, and who pay them a fair liveable wage.


• Our challenges and travel are sustainable and carbon neutral - we build into the cost a component which is used to offset the carbon emissions from the flights and transfers.


• We offer your supporters meaningful and fulfilling experiences because they get to experience so much more than on a normal challenge.

What are the benefits?

There are plenty of companies which offer you charity events, and you may probably been working with some of them for many years. So what would be the benefit to you of working with different company?

Well, we believe there are several advantages:

• Our challenges help communities at home and abroad, which gives our challenges more appeal to potential supporters.


• Because our challenges support overseas projects, it avoids the ‘free holiday’ syndrome, whereby supporters find it hard to overcome the impression that their sponsors are simply paying for a free holiday.


• Local media interest is greater when there is a non-local angle on the story.


• Our challenges are carbon neutral, which makes them ethical and sustainable.


• We are a small, dedicated and flexible company which offer a personal service and excellent support to our charity partners.


• We offer you a range of marketing support services for your fundraising events, and we seek to help you to make our challenges a success for you, for us, and for the local community.


• As an ATOL-bonded tour operator, you know you can trust our organisation and you are ATOL-protected abroad.

What Do You Offer?

Open and Bespoke Challenges

We have a wide variety of Open Challenges worldwide, ranging from trekking the Inca Trail in Peru combined with helping to refurbish an Andean school to trekking across the Moroccan Sahara combined with teaching children and learning about the Berber way of life to climbing Mount Fansipan in Vietnam and working in an orphanage.

Our challenges all include an aspect of volunteering which makes our trips unique, which in turn helps encourage people to sponsor the participants who may otherwise feel as though they are paying for a person's holiday.

What is an Open Challenge?

An "Open Challenge" is a charity fundraising trip, with a pre-planned departure date, in which supporters of any cause or charity can participate.

It is open to individuals, or to groups who have joined to work together and support the organisation of their choice. Your charity can get involved by promoting a particular trip so that your supporters can sign up and raise money for your cause.

How Can My Charity Get Involved With Your Open Challenges?

You may wish to add a page to your website or a mention in your newsletter explaining more about a particular trip we offer, and information about how your supporters can get involved to raise money for your charity.

We will support you by providing trip notes, dossiers, photographs for promotional materials and much more to help encourage your supporters to get involved.

Download our 2011 flyers here: (opens in new tab)
Borneo Jungle Trek 2011
Canada Dog Sledding 2011
India Himalayas Trek 2011
Kilimanjaro 2011
Nepal Himalayas Trek2011
Inca Trail 2011
Sahara Challenge 2011
Zambezi Challenge 2011

Is There Anything Else You Can Offer Besides Open Challenges?

Yes! Not only do we offer Open Challenges, but we can also organise bespoke challenges which encompass the aims of a particular charity. For example, if your charity works with homeless children, we could organise a trip which incorporates this type of work into it, such as trekking in Peru combined with helping restore a hostel for homeless children in Cusco.

In short, everyone wins!

We are able to put together trips anywhere in the world, with a multitude of projects, and challenges. Please get in touch with your ideas and we will work together to create your perfect challenge.

The benefit of bespoke trips are that your supporters have the opportunity to get involved in work that your charity supports so they feel they are doing something to actually make a difference, it helps people at home learn more about what you do, and it helps the communities abroad that you are working with.

Frequently Asked Questions

1/ How do Different Travel receive their own funds? Is there an annual fee, annual fee and share of each trip’s sponsor money, or just the latter? If there is a share of the trip’s fee, what amount would we expect to go to the charity and how much would go to Different Travel?

If you choose to promote one of our Open Challenges we will provide you with tour information, photos, and everything you need to get people interested in wanting to book. Once they decide they want to participate, depending on our agreement with you, they will either book directly through us on our website, or through you using a booking form. They pay us a participation fee (usually around £300), and then we ask them to raise a minimum amount of sponsorship. This amount will depend on the tour. They pay the sponsorship to you 12 weeks before departure, and then we invoice you for the balance of the tour costs 8 weeks before departure.

As an example, for the Inca Trail Challenge 2011, the cost of the tour is £1,950. The participant pays £350 of that cost to us as a participation fee within 14 days of booking, leaving the balance of £1,600. We will then ask them to raise £3,200 minimum sponsorship, payable to their chosen charity 12 weeks before departure. 10 weeks before departure, we invoice the charity for the remaining cost of the tour (£1,600) and you keep the extra £1,600 as a donation.

There are no annual fees, you do not sign up for anything, there is absolutely no financial outgoing required at all for your involvement in the tour. We are here in a capacity to help you raise funds by offering fundraising challenges.

Things work slightly differently with bespoke challenges. For ease, I will give you another example.
Let's assume that you want to do a bespoke trip to Vietnam, climbing the challenging Mount Fansipan (we can organise bespoke trips to any destination in the world – you name it – we do it!). We'll work out a costing, say £1900 per person, the deposit would be £300, leaving a tour costs balance of £1600. We then add a minimum fundraising donation for the charity (usually twice the amount of the balance) = minimum sponsorship total £3200.
Although, we do encourage people to pay for the tour costs themselves if they can, then all the fundraising can be given to the charity.

We will then help you promote this tour, and you will send out booking forms, and you receive the deposits from the interested parties. Depending on our agreement, once you have reached minimum numbers, we will invoice you for the deposits that you have received from your minimum of 10 and will then continue to let your participants fundraise to reach the target we have agreed upon in this example (£2600 each). We would then invoice you as with the Open Challenges, 10 weeks before departure for the tour balance. If you do not reach your minimum numbers in the allotted time, you can refund all the money received to those who have booked, making it a safe investment for them financially, and also for you.

2/ Are insurance issues and the like handled by Different Travel?

Insurance is not strictly organised by us, although we have are aware of a company that offers excellent policies. We encourage participants to organise their own insurance for ease and less administration time for both us and the charity, however it is important that all the activities included in the trip are covered in the insurance policy.

3/ Besides recruiting, encouraging and supporting sponsors before and after the trip(s), is there anything else the charity are obliged or encouraged to do?

Different Travel gives you, the charity fundraiser, as much support as possible to make the organisation and running of the trip easy and problem free for you. Depending on our agreement, you can have as much or as little direct involvement with the participants as you can manage. One of our charity partners works by sending out the booking forms and information to their supporters, but directs those interested in booking directly to Different Travel, so we can help them with the booking process. This way the charity can focus on helping the participants with fundraising ideas and their other duties as fundraisers.
Another one of our partners works as an intermediary between the participants and us, and the participants do not deal directly with us until they are on the tour. Of course usually it is somewhere in the middle. It really is flexible depending on what you would like to do.

All we ask is that you put a mention of the tour on your newsletter/fundraising documentation/website to help yourselves get as much exposure as possible. We do not insist on your spending money on advertisement or anything which requires financial outgoings. Really, the ball is in your court!

4/ If we were only able to recruit, say, two people for a trip that there should be ten on, are the other participants sources from other similar charities / people who have been profiled as similar or just a random mix. How does this issue sort itself out?

If you have arranged a bespoke trip and you were only able to recruit 2 out of 10, it is likely it would need to be postponed or cancelled. However, the participants may still wish to participate in a challenge type fundraising activity, in which case we would offer them the chance to transfer to any of our Open Challenges instead, so they could still raise money for the charity.

If you are promoting an Open Challenge, the participants will be mixed up with other people fundraising for a variety of charities, or those just going on the trip as a self-funded challenge! If we did not reach minimum numbers on the Open Challenge, then sadly we would have to cancel it, and either refund the deposit, or allow them to transfer to another tour. It is unlikely that we would fail to reach minimum numbers.

5/ Simply for our own potential recruitment, do you have any participants’ testimonies?

We certainly do! This is something we can provide for you with the other support documents we would send out to you.

6/ Which Open Challenges can we promote?

All our Open Challenges are displayed on our destinations page.
If the tour you are interested in does not appear on our Open Challenge page, why not get in touch to discuss organising a bespoke departure?

What should you do next?

If you are interested in talking to us about our open or bespoke challenges, contact us via email or call +44 (0)7881 698623 for more information.