Responsible travel
Found, or Arranged?
Some wildlife encounters happen because you were patient. Others happen because something was put there. We think you should know which you are booking.
Glacial Expeditions prefers operators that find wildlife rather than draw it in. We will still book voyages that include baited or provisioned encounters — they are common, and in some places they are the only way to reach a species — but we tell travellers which activities involve attraction before they book rather than after. The decision stays with the traveller.
What counts as a found encounter?
A found encounter is wildlife located by a guide who knows where to look, watched at a distance the animal sets. It depends on patience, weather and luck, and nothing is guaranteed. The absence of a guarantee is the point: an animal that is free to leave is behaving normally.
Most of what we book works this way. A naturalist reads a shoreline, a captain slows the ship, and sometimes there is nothing there. The days that fail are part of the same arrangement as the days that do not.
What counts as an arranged one?
An arranged encounter is anything where food, light, sound or a structure changes an animal's behaviour so that a person can see it. Baiting, provisioning, spotlighting, chumming, playback calls and habituation feeding all belong in this category, whatever the excursion is called on the itinerary.
- Baiting — food used to bring an animal within view, then usually withdrawn
- Provisioning — regular feeding that changes where an animal spends its time
- Spotlighting — light used to find or hold a nocturnal animal
- Chumming — blood or oil in the water to concentrate predators
- Playback calls — recorded calls that pull a displaying male off his post
- Habituation feeding — animals fed until they associate people with food
Where do we draw the line?
We do not treat this as a ban. We treat it as disclosure. We will not describe a baited encounter as a wildlife sighting, and we will not put one in an itinerary without saying so. Where an operator runs an activity in a way we think is poor, we name the operator and say why.
We book these voyages. Almost every operator we work with runs at least one arranged activity somewhere in a season, and we are not holding ourselves above an industry we sell. What we can do is stop the language from doing the work — an encounter that depended on bait should not be written up as a sighting.
What does that mean in practice?
Three examples already on this site: the whale shark bagans in Cenderawasih Bay, piranha fishing in the Peruvian Amazon, and nocturnal caiman spotlighting on the same rivers. Each is arranged, each is common, and each is described on its own page as what it is.
Whale sharks at the Cenderawasih Bay bagans
Whale sharks gather at working lift-net fishing platforms because baitfish are held in the nets. We book it, and we say on the Cenderawasih Bay page that it is a provisioned encounter with a real conservation argument attached.
Piranha fishing in the Peruvian Amazon
Guides use raw meat on a hand line, and fish are released after being landed. It is on nearly every vessel's excursion list, it is optional, and the Amazon wildlife page calls it a baited activity rather than a highlight.
Nocturnal caiman spotlighting
Skiffs sweep the banks with lamps to pick up eyeshine after dark. Lighting a nocturnal animal is a disturbance; we ask how a crew runs it, we tell you it can be skipped, and we say the same on the Pacaya-Samiria page.
What about the argument on the other side?
The argument against our preference is a serious one, and we are not certain we are right. In some places provisioning gives a community an economic reason to protect a species rather than fish it. For a child, catching and releasing a piranha may be the moment a rainforest becomes real. Rehabilitation centres feed animals because that is care, not attraction.
In Cenderawasih Bay, the fishermen's tolerance of the sharks is what made a decade of satellite tagging possible, and that science supported the designation of new protected waters. A species that earns a village money is a species that village has a reason to keep. Take the tourism away and the incentive goes with it.
The case for a child is different but not weaker. Plenty of thoughtful parents judge that an hour on a hand line is what turns a rainforest from a documentary into a place their child has touched, and that a life spent caring about rivers can start there. We do not think they are being careless.
And feeding is not always attraction. A rehabilitation centre feeds manatees because the animals cannot yet feed themselves. Calling that provisioning would be a category error.
We are not setting this argument up to knock it down. It may simply be right, and in specific places we think it probably is.
What the rules look like from on board.
On our February 2024 Antarctic voyage aboard the World Navigator, one briefing detail stuck with us more than the distance rules: guests were asked to close their curtains at night and turn off balcony lights, to reduce the risk of bird strikes. That never appears in a brochure, and it is a good illustration of what protecting a place actually involves in practice.
The harder part is that a found encounter is not a staged one. At Duroch Island we watched leopard seals hunting chinstrap penguins. Animals in these places are hunting, feeding and raising young, and the day does not sort itself into pleasant scenes. Sometimes you are watching something beautiful and sometimes you are watching the food chain. Both are part of it, and that is the difference between an encounter you found and one that was arranged for you.
The full account is in our World Navigator journal entry.
The Galápagos, as a worked example.
The Galápagos is the clearest case we know of regulation producing a better encounter rather than a worse one. Every visitor site requires a licensed naturalist guide, and visitors stay at least two metres from the wildlife. Both rules are enforced rather than suggested.
What makes it unusual is that the animals do not move away. The two metres are therefore the visitor’s responsibility, not the animal’s — and the consequence is that the sea lions still behave as though people are not there. That behaviour is exactly what the rules protect. Nothing is put out, nothing is called in, and the encounter is better for it.
Our week there is written up in The Galápagos Aboard the Evolution.
French Polynesia, as a second worked example.
Nothing we saw on our land trip through Tikehau, Taha’a and Bora Bora was arranged. The reef sharks came in past the bungalow at dusk because that is when they feed. The lemon shark on a motu snorkel was simply there. And the best sites on a guided Bora Bora excursion were places our guide already knew, including one he takes his own family to, rather than places where anything had been put out to hold animals in position.
The other thing worth naming is what the operator was doing with the reef. At Taha’a we watched a coral restoration demonstration and spent time learning about the biorock work going on around the resort. That is an operator investing in the reef it sits on rather than only selling access to it, and it is a fair question to ask anywhere you are being sold a lagoon.
The trip is written up in French Polynesia: An Island-Hopping Adventure.
What we ask of operators.
That they follow the applicable code — IAATO in Antarctica, AECO in the Arctic, national park rules elsewhere. That guides enforce distance rather than negotiate it. That any activity can be declined without forfeiting the rest of the day. And that they tell us honestly what an excursion involves when we ask.
The distance rules themselves are set out in our responsible travel guidelines, and how we assess operators over a whole season is on sustainable travel impact.
What you can ask us.
Whether a given itinerary includes any arranged encounter. How a specific operator runs it. Whether it can be skipped, and what the rest of the group does meanwhile. We answer plainly, including when the answer might cost us the booking.
A note on what this is.
We are travel advisors, not biologists, and this is a position rather than a standard. We have changed our minds about things before and expect to again. If a traveller or an operator thinks we have a case wrong, we would like to hear it.
Written by your expedition advisor
Erika Commisso · Travel Experience Architect
CLIA Elite Cruise Counselor · ASTA Verified Travel Advisor · Signature Travel Expert
Chris and Erika have sailed ten expedition voyages and toured seven more expedition ships. Favorite explorations so far: Antarctica, Svalbard, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Alaska, the Galápagos, the Scottish Hebrides, Churchill and French Polynesia.
Last updated .
Last updated 2026-09-05
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