ACE Cultural Tours Joins Safer Tourism Pledge

We’re pleased to share that ACE Cultural Tours, the UK's longest-established cultural tour operator, is the latest travel provider to sign up to the Safer Tourism Pledge, the leading commitment to traveller risk, health and safety.  

Founded in 1958 and with more than 68 years of experience delivering expert-led tours across the UK, Europe and the world, ACE Cultural Tours has built a reputation that speaks for itself: more than 55% of its customers are repeat bookers, drawn back year after year by the quality, care and trust that define every ACE journey. Joining the Safer Tourism Pledge is the next step in that story, a formal commitment to placing traveller safety at the centre of ACE's operations. It signals to customers, suppliers and the wider industry that this is a company that holds itself to the highest standards. 

Temple of Apollo, as featured on ACE Cultural Tours itinerary The Peloponnese: Land of Legends

The Safer Tourism Pledge is a set of commitments developed in partnership with the travel industry, articulating a stringent approach to traveller risk, health and safety. Safer Tourism assesses the safety management systems of companies wishing to sign up, and travel companies in turn agree to adhere to the Pledge's six commitments: mission alignment, safety excellence, advise and inform, highly responsive, sharing data and best practice, and influence for improvement. 

For ACE Cultural Tours, signing the Pledge is both a recognition of the work already done and a catalyst for continued improvement. The validation process is an independent assessment of health and safety systems, processes and customer communications, and it provides a structured framework for ACE to review, refine and build on the safety practices that are already embedded in its culture.  

Paul Brooke Barnes, Managing Director of ACE Cultural Tours, said: "We are proud to join forces with the Safer Tourism Foundation and the other Pledge Partners to exchange ideas to further improve standards of traveller safety. Our customers have been travelling with ACE for decades, and many of them do so because they trust us to take their safety and wellbeing seriously. The Safer Tourism Pledge gives that trust an independent foundation and gives us a renewed focus on making every journey as safe as it is enriching." 

Stefan Burnley, Head of Health and Safety at ACE Cultural Tours, said: "At ACE, health and safety does not exist in a silo; it is a core principle. Joining the Safer Tourism Pledge gives us an independent framework to test and strengthen the work we already do. It is an opportunity to look critically at every stage of the customer journey, from tour development and supplier vetting to the advice customers receive before they travel, and to ensure that the standards ACE sets for itself remain at the forefront of the industry. We’re excited to join a community of peers to learn from as we continue to raise the bar." 

As a Safer Tourism Pledge partner, ACE Cultural Tours joins other leading travel companies, such as easyJet Holidays, TUI, Intrepid Travel and Simpson Travel, in working collaboratively to identify potential travel risks and proactively prevent harm to travellers. ACE Cultural Tours will also share anonymised travel incident data with the Safer Tourism Foundation, contributing to an evidence base that currently reflects more than ten million trips a year across the Pledge partner network. The dataset also factors into Safer Tourism’s annual Travel Behaviours Risk Index, tracking the biggest risks and safety challenges for travellers and operators.

Katherine Atkinson, CEO of the Safer Tourism Foundation, said: "ACE Cultural Tours has spent more than six decades earning the trust of its customers. That trust is built, in no small part, on the confidence travellers have that ACE will look after them. Joining the Safer Tourism Pledge is a powerful signal that ACE is committed to enhancing its standards further, and it shows that even the most long-established tour operators share our belief in the value of collaborating with others across the industry to improve safety for all."