Way up in Northwestern Argentina you’ll find Socompa Adventure Travel, a company founded and run by purpose-driven entrepreneurs. Socompa guides lead their guests across the infinity of the Puna Plateau. They traverse dry salted lakes, volcanoes, groups of wild vicunas, a salt mirror covering more than 30,000 acres, and the old capital of the Puna, to name just a few adventures. Alongside this thriving travel business, Socompa is also very active in furthering sustainable tourism development in the region.
Through their Socompa Lab, Socompa team members organize safety trainings for guides. They also provide advice to the Ministry of Tourism on sustainability and climate topics through their participation in a government initiative called Salta Sostenible. The initiative was created to develop a portfolio of “responses and proposals to face the challenges resulting from both the impacts of tourism and climate change in the Province of Salta.”
At their most recent training, the Socompa team shared their experiences with other guides in the region about working with ISO Standards, as well as the Adventure Travel Guide Qualification and Performance Standard. The course had an attendance limit of 50 people, and demand from more than twice that number, so a second edition is already in discussion. The group of instructors was formed by:
- Federico Ochoa, tourism professor, operations manager of Socompa and tour guide
- Gastón Huerga, senior guide of Socompa with a degree in adventure travel and tourism
- Ignacio Ortiz de Urbina, mountaineer, rescuer, rafting guide, and instructor
General Manager Mariana Caliuolo led the development of the curriculum with the advice of Dan Moore, of Pandion Consulting for specific content on Interpretation.
As Mariana noted, “We always include sustainability, since we consider tour guides as sustainability agents. They are in the field in direct contact with nature and with the possibility to educate travelers (we have huge areas of land that do not have rangers, for example).”
In keeping with Socompa’s true passion for sustainability, they have included Tomorrow’s Air as a piece of their sustainability strategy this year and are developing new projects to help share the education gathered through the initiative with their tourism supply chain partners and guests.
If you want to learn more about the approach and tools the team at Socompa is using, send a message to climate@adventuretravel.biz and we’ll put you in touch!