For years, many tourism operators have thought of guests as spectators of sustainability efforts. Explain your conservation work, maybe include a beach clean-up, or community engagement and hope the message sticks. But, awareness on its own does not change behaviour nearly as effectively as participation does. Secret Paradise Maldives offers an interesting example of what happens when you take sustainability out of the back-office exercise and start making impact measurement, conservation activity and even data collection part of the guest experience itself.
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Ruth discovered the Maldives more than 25 years ago as a scuba diver chasing mantas and whale sharks. On these trips, Maldivian friends welcomed her into their homes, shared afternoon hedhika and betel nuts, and showed her a version of the archipelago that most visitors never see. After 30 visits to the Maldives, a chance meeting on a beach sparked a conversation about how, with the recent introduction of local island guesthouses, visitors could experience a more connected, authentic side of the country;, one that supported local communities, celebrated Maldives culture, and encouraged responsible tourism.
That conversation led to the co-founding of Secret Paradise Maldives in 2012, with the aim of offering a different vision of what a Maldives holiday could be.
Sustainability as A Business Structure
From day one, the business pushed back against the dominant model of Maldives tourism, which funnels visitors into luxury resorts and keeps most of their spending contained within those walls. Secret Paradise wanted to replicate the experiences Ruth had been fortunate to have, connect guests with local guesthouses, island communities, family businesses and NGOs, and keep visitor spending moving through the broader economy.
The organisation views their sustainability commitment as structural. Responsible tourism, Ruth says, means making decisions that account for people, place and future generations, and the company applies that standard even when it costs something. Secret Paradise has declined tour requests it did not consider responsible. For example, it removed long-distance inter-atoll day tours in 2021 to reduce fuel use and emissions, accepting the revenue hit because the environmental impact was clear. Beef and seafood have also been taken off the conservation cruise menus. The company follows strict marine life codes of conduct, aligned with organisations like the Manta Trust, Maldives Whale Shark Research and the Olive Ridley Project. It builds direct financial contributions to local NGOs, such as Save the Beach Maldives, into selected tour experiences, all so that conservation funding is a built-in feature of the product rather than an optional add-on.
Ruth calls the educational layer of this work “unconscious learning.” Guests don’t absorb knowledge about reef-safe behaviour, snorkel etiquette and respectful conduct in island communities very well through a lecture, but they do retain the lesson quite well through the design of the experience itself. The Secret Paradise Education Hub, an online platform Ruth built and maintains, gives guests access to marine life and ocean resources before they even board a boat. By the time someone joins a tour, they should already understand more about how they are travelling and why it makes a difference.
Good Intentions Versus Intentional Good
There is a point in the life of any purpose-driven business where values alone stop being enough. You can do the right things for the right reasons and still have no reliable way to know whether you are improving, and no evidence to share with legislators, partners, investors, and guests who want to see proof rather than promises.
Ruth is refreshingly direct about how good intentions, on their own, run out of road. “If you cannot measure progress,” she says, “it is harder to improve and harder to communicate honestly.” For a long time, Secret Paradise tracked its impact the way most small operators do, using spreadsheets, internal notes, supplier invoices, and institutional memory. That approach worked to a point, and then it stopped working, because data scattered across a dozen places struggles to tell you anything useful about trends. Ad-hoc, piece-meal tracking makes honest reporting nearly impossible, and it keeps impact measurement locked in the back office where no one, but the team ever sees it.
When Secret Paradise Maldives shifted to using Baotree, an impact measurement platform built for the tourism space, with users like Sabi Sabi, Cottar’s Safaris, WWF and more, the organisation brought its sustainability data into one system. The team had already started measuring carbon across its tours in 2023, but much of the information still sat across spreadsheets, operational records and separate tracking processes. Now that all the data is consolidated in Baotree, Secret Paradise can view and analyse its sustainability statistics more clearly across all day and multi-day tours, including transport, meals, activities and guiding. Individual tours now carry their own carbon values, which allows both guests and the team to understand impact at the level of a single experience rather than only at company level.
Guests Can Collect Data, Too
Most interestingly, Secret Paradise takes one step beyond educating guests about sustainability, and includes them in the data capture itself.
Using Baotree, Secret Paradise now includes data collection into select guest activities. During reef clean-ups, beach clean-ups and coral restoration work, guests can see what is being recorded and understand why it matters. This alters the guest experience…travelers are much more likely to care about a reef they helped monitor than one they simply swam over.
The measurement becomes part of the Secret Paradise experience rather than something that happens after everyone has gone home, and that shift from private record-keeping to shared, visible activity is something any operator running conservation or community-focused experiences could replicate.
Guests who travel with genuine curiosity and choose operators like Secret Paradise because they want more than a sunbed and a swim are already motivated. They want to be involved. More operators could give guests a meaningful way to channel that motivation, using systems like Baotree to capture and communicate what that involvement produces.
During their first season using Baotree between November and April, the Secret Paradise team discovered that involving guests in the data collection process also changed the experience for Tour Leaders. The process started creating natural conversations between guides and guests about reefs, conservation, and impact.
Making Impact Undeniable
Travellers, partners, press and even governments are increasingly skeptical of green claims and want demonstrable proof of sustainability and impact claims. Good work that goes unmeasured is good work that goes unverified, and in an environment where greenwashing accusations follow any operator who overclaims, being able to show your data is quickly becoming a competitive necessity instead of a nice-to-have.
Secret Paradise uses Baotree to point to carbon measurements at the tour level, track conservation activity outputs, document guest participation in data capture, and report on NGO contributions built into specific experiences. The data speaks for itself, and because it is collected consistently through a single platform rather than assembled from disparate sources, it holds up to scrutiny.
Sustainable Supply Chains
Waste systems, logistics and import dependence in the Maldives present challenges that sit well outside the control of a single tour operator, and measuring the indirect impacts that run through a supply chain is a problem the industry as a whole has not solved. Secret Paradise is currently working on a project to help its supply chain partners understand their own carbon emissions and identify where and what they can reduce.
They are also working to bring more local food into island tours, which deepens the cultural authenticity of the guest experience and directly strengthens the economic relationship between tourism and local food producers.
It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint
Ruth’s advice to other operators who want to take their impact more seriously is to start before they feel ready. Do not wait for a perfect system or a large budget. Measure what you can, improve incrementally, and be honest about the gaps. Sustainability, as she puts it, is a marathon and not a sprint. The operators who get this right are the ones who treat it as permanent work rather than a project with a completion date.
Secret Paradise Maldives is almost fifteen years into that marathon, and Ruth and her team are still running.
