Travelling green around Asean
Business Times 5 Jan 09;
'Ecopreneur' Cindy Chng tells QUAH CHIN CHIN about her ECO Travel agency and its environment-friendly tours
LIKE most of her peers in school, Cindy Chng strives to juggle classes with school projects and examinations.
Unlike them, however, she has led groups of schoolchildren to wade across muddy rivers in Thailand, and picked mussels to cook for meals.
The 19-year-old does so because she wears an extra hat as the founder and managing director of ECO Travel, which organises environment-friendly tours to Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.
The idea of a sustainable business was born after Cindy, a first-year business student at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), participated in several Asean youth forums, during which she and fellow youngsters from other countries in the region discussed issues related to education and sustainability.
It was also at the forums that she met Wilson Ang, president of the Environmental Challenge Organisation (ECO) Singapore - a non-profit organisation which provides business space and advice to youths keen to take up sustainable green causes, or 'ecopreneurs' as Mr Ang calls them - and subsequently partnered ECO Singapore to start her company last April.
'There is a lot of infrastructure development to drive tourism, which actually defeats the purpose of travel, because people travel to understand a culture and to appreciate what the place was like before the development, rather than to indulge in luxury,' noted Cindy, who previously did an internship at a travel agency here.
'You can find Disneylands everywhere, but what's special about that country? You have to go back to basics to really understand that.'
That is why her tours try to reduce the 'frills' associated with travelling and focus on culture and nature, such as interacting with the locals, learning to cook local dishes and bird-watching. She also attempts to offset travel costs by getting her customers to stay with local villagers instead of hotels and by using budget carriers and public transport.
'ECO Travel focuses on Asean destinations. The travels build a sustainable community for the nations because we create a source of income for them and educate the community to have a different view on travel,' said Cindy, adding that she works closely with tour agents in the countries to help 'make them more eco-friendly'.
Her customers comprise mainly schools that organise educational tours for students, and community centres looking for weekend travel. The tours, which typically last from two days to a week, are customised to suit her clients' needs, and this sometimes poses a challenge, she said.
'Our tours are very focused, so it's hard when we go to the schools, because they may have different objectives,' she explains. 'That is why we try to customise the tours to what they want and weave environmental learning into the process.'
Looking ahead, Cindy is targeting the tertiary institutions to diversify her clientele, as well as venturing into Indonesia and other parts of Asean. She added that ECO Travel will also recruit more Singaporeans who have been to the countries and have an understanding of the places, to serve as tour guides and facilitators.
'They are the ones who will add the environmental learning value,' said the articulate student, who intends to major in marketing. For example, the facilitator can share with the tour group information about sustainable farming on a visit to a former minefield.
Though still a young business, ECO Travel is already generating a 10 per cent profit margin, or about $100-300 a month, said Cindy, who acknowledges it's 'not much' but isn't discouraged.
'To me, a social enterprise is a business which has a social cause and uses the business mechanism to run and power the cause. I think the business and social aspects can mix, although somehow one of them has priority,' she said. 'For ECO Travel, the priority is the social cause - it's about the intangibles that we get in return from doing this.'
Still, she believes that social entrepreneurship remains a new concept among youths in Singapore, as many people have not yet grasped it.
'When you talk about social entrepreneurship in Singapore, it's more of doing some street sales and raising funds for charity - I think it's because the exposure in Singapore is not that great,' she said. 'When I meet my fellow Asean youths, I realise that they have a much deeper understanding of social entrepreneurship and they're very active in trying to create platforms.
'In Singapore, it's quite hard to get to that level because we don't really have that many people who are in need. So people focus their attention on charities.'
