ENVIRONMENT

Aneela is a member of the Tweed Valley Trails Association (TVTA) trail advocacy charity: she has invested a significant amount of time and energy in bringing together a new partnership with Forestry Land Scotland to adopt part of the unauthorised trail network and carry out regular trail maintenance and repair. She has been an active member of the board since 2017 and is also a qualified trail leader co-leading dig days in the Tweed Valley. Aneela was pivotal to organising a Love My Trails women’s dig day in November encouraging and educating more women to give back to the trails they ride.

We actively encourage the use of public transport by providing clients with a detailed breakdown of travel options in the pre-trip information packs we supply. Many of our clients use the sleeper train from London to access our tours in the North West Highlands. We maximise the use of public transport by picking up clients at different meeting points along the way. For example our ‘Torrid Affair’ pick up starts in Innerleithen and we have meeting points at Edinburgh Park, Perth, Dunkeld and Aviemore train stations. Additionally, we are developing products more closely aligned with public transport options e.g Borders Bike Bus and (in 2020) we are incentivising customers to use public transport wherever practical to join our trips through a ‘green deal’ incentive whereby we offer a scaled % trip fee discount linked to public transport usage.

Annually, we donate a % of trip fees to at least two environmental or trail advocacy organisations e.g Aberdeenshire Trail Association, TVTA or NTS Footpath Fund.

We operate ‘small footprint’ bike adventures to minimise any negative environmental impacts of running this kind of business. Although we are often asked about running large group trips in remote, sensitive locations but in line with our safety and environmental policies – that’s not really our forté.

We encourage our clients to consider their interaction with the environments they are riding wherever possible.

Our office practices have been thoroughly optimised and we are now almost entirely digital i.e 99% paper free.