Sustainable materials. Local employees. A river water recycling program. These were just a few signs that Bamboo Lodge, a small eco-lodge nestled in the Ecuadorian Amazon, was committed to helping the environment and local community.
But in the search for sustainable tourism destinations, master’s student Annie Combs found a lot of negative signs as well. Combs was working with two classmates, Kat Orellana and Sachiko Lamen, to research their environmental science master’s thesis at UC Santa Barbara. That research led them to Ecuador, where they interviewed guides and evaluated the most sustainable-looking hotels they could find to see if those hotels lived up to the claims on their websites.
The problem they found was that larger commercial lodges in Ecuador were outcompeting locally owned lodges, even though local spots like Bamboo Lodge were the ones doing better by the environment. Without the funds for marketing or a website, these smaller venues depended primarily on word of mouth. Combs wanted to help them reach the wider travel market.
“There was a very clear problem, we wanted to solve it, and we were in a cabin in the Amazon one night, and I was like, ‘You know, what if we just turn this into a business?’” Combs said.
After two years of research and development, ECPC Travel officially incorporated as a business in 2023. Combs became the CEO, Orellana the COO and Lamen the CMO, as they built a platform with the mission of connecting tourists with environmentally and socially responsible adventures—helping those tourists leave destinations better than they found them.
“What we call ourselves is the eco-friendly, socially conscious Expedia,” Combs said.
Any business can apply to sell their stays and experiences through ECPC Travel’s website, but providers have to pass the interview process and meet the startup’s standard for sustainability to be approved. Businesses are evaluated based on three criteria: environmental impacts, socio-economic health and education.
“Every business applies to be on our platform, they’re evaluated according to our standard, and then they can sell,” Combs said. “So you know that if something has been vetted really thoroughly by people who have lived and breathed this industry for a very long time, you can feel confident in [booking your travel].”
ECPC Travel currently offers vacations in Panama, Fiji, Peru, the Galapagos, the United States and Ecuador, with experiences ranging from seven-day, all-inclusive trips to day-long excursions.
“We lift up the little guys: the small, local lodges, even small hotels and cities, things like that,” Combs said. “So you don’t have to go into the middle of the wilderness to go off the beaten path and find something memorable, where you’re going to make a really amazing connection with the local community.”
ECPC Travel earns its revenue from a 10 percent commission on travel bookings, while the business owners keep the other 90 percent. Combs said it was important to them that the providers receive the bulk of the money so that it stays in the local community and can better the lives of the people living there.
“When you go through and you look at all these other travel sites, they take a bunch of money, but it doesn’t necessarily go back into the local community,” Combs said. “So when you go on a vacation, depending on where you’re at, between 60 and 90 percent of the money you spend on your trip exits the local community, so people aren’t really benefiting from the money you spend, which is counterintuitive.”
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Startup: ECPC Travel
Co-Founders: Annie Combs (CEO), Kat Orellana (COO), Sachiko Lamen (CMO)
Founded: 2023
Location: Raleigh
Website: ecpctravel.com
Funding: Raising pre-seed
To fund ECPC Travel, Combs and her co-founders are raising pre-seed funding and have received grants from accelerators across the country. They’ve won multiple awards from UC Santa Barbara, participated in the Future Founders accelerator out of Chicago, and received a changemaker grant from the Taco Bell Foundation. This past summer, with the startup now based in the Triangle, Combs and ECPC Travel also won the Founders Live pitch competition in Raleigh.
With an initial goal of raising $750,000, Combs said they are hoping to make the website more globally compatible for providers, allowing them to look at the interface in their native language and earn money in their currency. To accomplish this, ECPC Travel recently launched a new website—designed by fractional CTO Shawn Pack—which is completely customizable and can more easily meet providers’ needs.
“I think that’s really important for us moving forward, because we are not ourselves without them,” Combs said. “Our job is to make it as easy as possible to connect two halves of the sustainable travel market that just aren’t connected yet. It blows my mind that there’s this massive information gap, and people are settling for less because they just don’t know how to cross it.”
