Easy Tibet Tours is a local Tibetan travel agency based in Lhasa, started by Penpa Tsering and his friends. The staff of Easy Tibet Tours are all young Tibetans with the average age of 30. They have a rich experience in working in the tourism industry and are passionate about introducing their beautiful homeland and unique culture to friends from outside of Tibet.
Penpa: “Although Easy Tibet Tour is a young travel company, we have already organized hundreds of Tibet private and group tours around Tibet, and also have gained good feedback from our former clients who have continuously encouraged us to keep on improving our services and quality of the tours in the future.”
Tibetans with great English
Penpa: “Most of our staff were educated in language schools in Tibet and some of them in mainland or overseas universities. Most importantly, all of us are local Tibetans, and as former local tour guides, have accumulated many years of work experience in serving tourists and are familiar with the rich culture, history, and religion of our homeland. We have qualified friendly Tibetan tour guides and drivers working together. As a local Tibetan tour operator, we focus on ensuring that our customers experience the authenticity of Tibet and enjoy maximum comfort and safety during their travel with us. We also emphasize on promoting gender equality in terms of hiring staff.
We specialize in trekking, cycling and train tours, and our tour itineraries cover most of the famous cultural and natural sites in Tibet.”
Sharing with our community
Penpa: “Easy Tibet Tour has two long-term goals, and these goals are closely related to promoting eco friendly travel in Tibet.
One of the main goals is introducing our beautiful land and it’s people to tourists by hiring only locals and by making our contribution to the local communities by providing education opportunities and making donation to disadvantaged groups. From the start of our business, we aim to provide more opportunities to people in local community since we feel it is our responsibility towards our community.
We know education is a key element to improve the livelihood of people in our community and raise the awareness of the locals for the importance of keeping their own traditions. Some of our staff are providing English training to young local Tibetans since 2008 and some of students now have their tour guide license. Our staff also did English training to the disabled children in Lhasa Special Education School from 2009-2010, and collaborated with Tibetan Library to donated children’s books to the school.
We also donated clothes and books to children in Dangtse village of Lokha in 2015, which is one of the poorest villages in Tibet. At the same time, we always encourage our guides to bring our clients to consume in locally owned shops, stay in locally owned hotels and have meals in locally owned restaurants. And the clients usually are also willing to spend their money in locally owned shops, hotels or restaurants.”
Protecting the environment of our homeland
Penpa: “Another fundamental long-term goal of Easy Tibet Tour is protecting the environment and culture of our motherland from more and more commercialized travel activities. We have clearly noticed the changes in the land were we live and that we love. Hence our commitment of promoting eco tourism in Tibet by improving the awareness of our clients and staff in protecting the environment.
For instance, we don’t recommend our clients to use vehicles in Lhasa. Instead, we recommend our clients to visit sites in Lhasa by using public transportation accompanied by our Tibetan guides. This is a win-win for our clients and us, since we make contribution in protecting the environment of our homeland by reducing the use of vehicles during our clients’ stay in Tibet, and the clients also save money from not renting cars in Lhasa and getting a local experience.
In addition, every guide of Easy Tibet Tours always tries his (her) best to answer the questions which clients ask about the culture of their homeland and our guides all have extensive information on protecting culture heritage of Tibet. Hence, most of our guides constantly study Tibetan language and history during wintertime when few tourists come to visit Tibet.
As a local tour operator in the Tibetan plateau, we know the importance of protecting the environment of the land we called home, and we will definitely seek opportunities to send our staffs to join any eco tourism relevant training or healthcare training whenever it is available for us.”