TripAdvisor, Viator halt ticket sales to hundreds of animal attractions

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TripAdvisor and its subsidiary Viator will cease ticket sales to hundreds of wildlife entertainment products, months after supporters of nonprofit World Animal Protection signed a petition against the travel search engine’s selling and promotion of controversial wildlife tourist attractions.

Activities that bring travellers into contact with captive or endangered wildlife will be removed from TripAdvisor’s booking content, including elephant rides, tiger petting venues and “swim with” programmes where tourists touch or ride dolphins.

Along with the revision in booking policy, TripAdvisor said it will also launch an education portal with information on animal welfare practices and linked to every one of its wildlife attraction listings.

World Animal Protection will work with TripAdvisor on this new portal, along with other wildlife conservation and sustainable tourism partners such as Global Wildlife Conservation, Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit and PATA.

This represents a victory for World Animal Protection, said its CEO Steve McIvor, which earlier this year had launched a campaign against cruel tiger tourist venues and had called TripAdvisor out for promoting and selling tickets to such attractions.

Tracy Reiman, executive vice president of PETA, said: “By refusing to sell tickets to businesses that treat animals as entertainment or playthings, TripAdvisor is making a precedent-setting statement about the use and abuse of animals for entertainment.”

McIvor added: “We hope it will only be a matter of time before TripAdvisor will also come to realise that it has to end sales to all cruel wildlife attractions such as SeaWorld, where animals endure a lifetime of abuse and highly stressful training to perform.”

“Until then, we will provide the best education we can on TripAdvisor’s website to steer people away from cruel venues like these.”

TripAdvisor will discontinue sales of some attractions immediately and plans to have both the educational portal and booking policy changes fully implemented by early 2017.

The travel site stated that the policy amendment will not apply to domestic animal attractions such as horseback riding stables; children’s petting zoos with domestic animals like rabbits; aquarium touch pools used for educational purposes; feeding programmes where tourists are under supervision of professionals; voluntourism programmes for endangered species preservation at zoos; and aquariums or sanctuaries that make possible some level of physical interaction with an animal.

For attractions that can provide evidence that they are in-policy, but were impacted by TripAdvisor’s decision, there will be an appeals process to re-establish ticket sales.

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