Your “Tibetan” Travel Agent may not be Tibetan!
Travelers to Tibet are increasingly aware of the need to support the Tibetan economy and culture by hiring a Tibetan travel agent and local Tibetan guides.
Unfortunately, there has been very little information online to help you find dependable agencies truly owned and run by Tibetans.
If you Google “tibet travel” or something similar, you will get a whole bunch of Chinese-owned companies trying hard to look Tibetan. We understand that in Lhasa it is common even for Chinese guides to pretend they are Tibetan, or “half” Tibetan.
The online Tibet travel discussion forums are full of requests for reliable companies, but these requests very rarely receive a clear answer. All too often, the people who answer are travel companies pretending to be unbiased travelers! Many are not, but it becomes hard to know who to trust.
From your home country, while you are planning your trip, it’s almost impossible to sift the real thing from the fakes, and there are a lot of fakes out there.
The simplest way to find a high-quality agent is to ask us to connect you to a reliable Tibetan-owned travel agent to plan a great trip for you that also supports the local Tibetan economy and culture.
We have researched this issue for a long time, both to help you find trustworthy Tibetan travel companies, and also to help support the honest, hard-working Tibetan-owned travel agencies.
A NOTE ABOUT COSTS: Travel in Tibet is quite expensive, no matter which agent you use, and we work only with very reliable, well-respected agents, which means that we don’t really offer budget travel.
SOLO TRAVELERS: Our agents can help form groups on a limited number of fixed-departure trips in the Tibet Autonomous Region, and to a lesser extent, in Kham and Amdo. (For Eastern Tibet travel, they can only help form groups in the higher seasons, not in the late fall/winter/early spring.)
DISCLAIMER: YoWangdu makes every effort to find you superb, trustworthy travel agents, but we can’t and don’t guarantee the services provided by these agents. We are not part of any agreements or contracts you may make with the travel agents and we have no responsibility for any loss or damage of any nature that may result due to your agreements with the agencies, or for any aspect of your trip to Tibet.
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