Insight Australia Travel (IAT) is an inbound tour operator specialising in tailor-made group travel experiences across Australia.
IAT partners with our sister company, Australian Geographic Travel (AGT), to produce tours that specialise in nature, wildlife, and conservation-focused travel. We are excited to produce itineraries that explore Australia’s landscapes, wildlife, and Aboriginal culture.
As a team, we are always looking for ways to raise our sustainability standards.
We have an internal Green Team made up of a variety of departments across our business. The team meets monthly to identify opportunities to reduce our environmental footprint and drive more sustainable action across our business. Each month, our employees take part in sustainability challenges that encourage them to make more environmentally conscious decisions. We have a formalised set of expectations we outline to our staff through our company-wide sustainability policy.
Our team actively participates in programmes such as Take 3 for the Sea, picking up three pieces of litter whenever we visit a beach or walk in our local environment, and Australia’s Biggest Bushwalk, connecting our staff with the natural environments we work so hard to protect. We have also introduced our latest initiative of tracking our staff flight emissions.
All these initiatives are communicated through our monthly newsletter entitled ‘It’s in Our Nature’ that keeps our staff aligned with our conservation travel policies as we strive toward making improvements wherever we can.
We recognise and respect the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which we travel, and pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.
We are always interested in learning about First Nations culture and including a First Nations perspective. IAT maintains an active list of First Nations suppliers we work with and always looks to include at least one First Nation’s educational experience in each itinerary, as we believe it is important that guests learn about Australia’s culture.
We have a formal Acknowledgement of Country on all IAT formal documentation, including itineraries, service lists, contact lists, and travel documents sent to our clients.
Our Managing Director, Birgit Bourne, plays an active role in several industry programs designed to help First Nations tourism products connect to trade and export opportunities. Birgit Bourne represents AGT/IAT at State Tourism Operator (STO) events, including Western Australia’s Tourism Event – Sandtalk and is engaged with the Western Australian Indigenous Tour Operators Council.
She has also participated in the Mornington Island Tourism Queensland workshop, working directly with local operators to strengthen their trade capability. Birgit is also involved with Discover Aboriginal Experiences (DAE), the national collective of certified Aboriginal tourism businesses, contributing to their trade shows and learning initiatives that build pathways to international markets.
The Koala Clancy Foundation is a Victorian not-for-profit dedicated to protecting and growing the wild koala population in the You Yangs region, west of Melbourne. Founded by Janine Duffy, the Foundation focuses on habitat restoration, planting and protecting food trees for koalas, and monitoring and research to support them.
Each guest booked through IAT contributes $10 to the Koala Clancy Foundation. Across the in2025/26 financial year, this support totalled $9,000. Thank you for helping make this possible.
We aim to eliminate single-use plastics from our tour operations and encourage our partners and suppliers to do the same.
Many group tours have historically used plastic water bottles for travellers’ convenience and comfort, but we now actively request that no single-use water bottles be provided on our coach charters, instead encouraging guests to bring their own reusable water bottle and use our refill options.
To reduce the hundreds of bottles a group may use throughout their stay, we now offer clients the opportunity to include a reusable drink bottle with their Insight Australia group travel arrangements.
We prioritise working with eco-certified suppliers wherever possible, choosing partners who share our values and can demonstrate a genuine commitment to sustainable, responsible practices.
To do this, we maintain a regular database of suppliers and the eco recognitions they hold.
We are proud to be Ecotourism Australia Business Supporters. As a Business Supporter, we align our operations with Ecotourism Australia's best practices and benefit from ongoing guidance, a community of suppliers, resources, and benchmarking tools. This has inspired us to complete audits like their Sustainability Scorecard Assessment (referenced below). This helps us continually improve our environmental, social, and cultural performance.
In the 2025/26 financial year, our internal Green Team completed a Sustainability Scorecard Assessment for both Australian Geographic Travel (AGT) and Insight Australia Travel (IAT) through Ecotourism Australia, a pre-certification benchmarking programme that measures business performance across 50 sustainability criteria, scored out of 100.
We achieved a score of 87% on 12th May 2026 across both brands of our business (IAT and AGT)
The assessment evaluates our business across four pillars:
Now that we have a clearer picture of where we stand, we are focused on addressing our gaps. Key priorities include expanding tour accessibility, deepening community impact and strengthening our documented policies, such as a buy-local policy, to better evidence our responsible tourism in action.
IAT & AGT have an internal sustainability policy that sets out the standards our team follows across every tour.
For staff, it explains our position on animal welfare, First Nations cultural respect, ethical marketing, and guidelines for minimising our impact on the wildlife and places we visit, and more. This document further explains the environmental, social and cultural standards we look to uphold as tour providers. As each new staff member joins our team, they must read and understand this and our broader conservation travel guidelines.
