Travel Classifieds & Advocacy Community

Step Up Travel is a travel classifieds site, established to allow local small enterprises and individuals publish web-page advertisements of their own unique cultural services, activities, and goods so that travelers can connect directly with them as an alternative to larger more commercial options.

By using Step Up Travel Classifieds and connecting directly with locals, travelers are able to learn of more obscure and fascinating activities, while also helping redirect money away from the commercial tourism industry and toward the people who make their culture what it is.

Step Up Travel was founded to help empower local enterprises compete in an industry dominated by tourism agencies. Aligning itself with the United Nations’ ST-EP initiative (Sustainable Tourism-Eliminating Poverty), Step Up Travel prides itself in being an freer marketplace for the travel industry, granting equal access to all service providers and helping redistributing wealth in a world that suffers from broadening inequalities.

Step Up Travel is also a trusted network of socially-minded travelers who can exchange ideas and recommendations, advocate for responsible travel practices, and seek meaningful interactions with local people when they travel. Through www.stepuptravel.org, Step Up Travelers have the unique opportunity to recommend and promote specific service providers they have met along the way, in order to help travelers and local people find and come to know one another.

Like this concept? Help spread the word and Join the Traveler Network

Step Up Travel's vision is to empower local people, organizations, and travelers to work together to promote quality responsible travel experiences and to emphasize the importance of personal exchanges, deeper cultural understanding, genuine benefit to local people and their communities, preservation of the environment, and ultimately a more peaceful and equitable world.

Step UP Travel’s mission:

• To provide a premier, online marketing tool for small tourism providers in developing countries in order to increase their visibility and revenue.
• To promote responsible tourism practices by providers and travelers.
• To build a trusted network for responsible travelers to meet one another, share experiences, and advocate for local people and travel in developing countries.

Current standards of practice in the tourism industry foster information gaps between traveler and local service providers in order to maintain high profit margins for intermediary booking services. The less a tourist knows about destination markets and prices, the more an intermediary agency can charge for making the connection. And the divide is getting larger as travel destinations expand into less-familiar countries. The extent of information gaps is commensurate to the growth of the industry itself.

Research data indicates that developing countries enjoyed 292.6 million international arrivals in 2000 and has continues to increase 9.5% per year since then, accounting for up to 40% of national GDP’s. And despite attracting 35% of international travelers each year, most developing countries have been unable to increase tourism profits because up to 85% of trips to such nations are planned, booked and financed through firms based in wealthier nations.

Step Up Travel was founded in 2005, therefore, to create a utility to address this problem. It intends to promote a freer market by granting equal access to our services and help under-represented service providers compete at a level known almost exclusively by tech-savvy companies.

What drives our website is the value generated by resolving information gaps, narrowing high profit margins maintained and enjoyed by intermediary agencies, and tending to a noble social agenda. The result is more income for service providers in destination countries, and greater access to more unique and affordable services to the traveler. The success of our company will be commensurate only to the value of service we provide to our users by bridging the divide. And just as the gaps to bridge are sizeable, so is the anticipated success of the Step Up Travel community.