Fair Trade Information:
In accordance with the principles of Responsible & Sustainable Tourism, we are committed to the following elements throughout the hotel, Fantasea Dive Centre and at Embah Safaris Tours & Travel.
Our hotel is locally owned by a prestigious Bedouin Sheikh and his family, built on lands belonging to their ancestors. Lease fees are introduced directly into the local community and distributed between many family members. By avoiding internationally-owned hotel chains, whose profits disappear out of the country, choosing Coral Coast Hotel / Fantasea Resort, for your holiday, ensures that the money you pay stays within the country and benefits the local economy. We are proud to maintain that all our staff are local originating from mainland Egypt or the Sinai peninsula. We provide in house training to all new members of staff, encouraging inexperienced locals the opportunity to start a career in the hospitality or dive industry.
Our local drivers, whom operate airport transfers and local transportation to dive sites and places of interest are all fully licensed and work under strict guidelines. All fresh produce is dispatched to Sinai from the Delta in mainland Egypt as there are no facilities in Sinai for mass-produced produce, although we do support and encourage a local Bedouin family whom have cultivated arid desert land to produce various fruits and vegetable. Although stock is not ample enough to sustain many Resorts, the crops are purely organic grown from seed and natural spring water. We support local tourism initiatives, and have created conservation projects together with National Parks of Egypt, to protect, conserve, educate & create awareness of the surrounding region & culture. We are also part of the eco-tourism program introduce to Sinai by The Travel Foundation, to establish guidelines for desert protection & training for local desert guides.
Throughout our hotel we display & sell locally produced items & crafts, ranging from beauty products, swimwear, beaded embroidery and art work. We aim to inform guests of the economical aspects & benefits of purchasing local crafts, where they have the choice to pay that little bit extra for something hand made as a pose to a vast majority of the imported alternatives on sale throughout Dahab.
In extension to our hotel products, whilst on safari in remote areas, we gently try to encourage our guests that purchasing local crafts from the desert dwelling women and children creates independence and pride also provides an income for the whole family. By helping to create this income, families have the means to continue residing in the desert plain as opposed to many who must relocate to the resort towns.
Divers are given a Reef Awareness briefing prior to diving to introduce them to the fragile eco-system of the Red Sea. We follow strict guidelines outlined by National Parks of Egypt and SSDM on marine conservation and diver conduct.
Fantasea Divers have developed a Reef Watch Program on our house reef, where continuous research is recorded and monitored by our divers. Guests have the opportunity to contribute to the program as a normal guided dive and data is fed into our database. Our ideal is for all to be part of an ever growing awareness of the environmental impact on mass tourism and the effects on local communities.
To date Dahab has managed to avoid being a mass tourism destination partly due to a large number of locally owned businesses and land owners still holding on to their lands and not selling off to large international companies. In saying that, there are some desert areas & underwater coral reefs in and around Dahab that are in danger of becoming destroyed (and have been destroyed ) due to large numbers of divers, snorkellers & travellers into the desert. It is on that note that we would like to ask you all to take care when visiting any sites, whether on land or underwater, and follow the basic guidelines outline by your guides/dive staff. Please ask your dive guides & desert guides of the rules to follow before going to these areas and ask to see their company policies on environmental & responsible tourism. We encourage our guests to make any suggestions to enhance our Eco Policies by chatting with the general manager directly of any ideas you may have.