Prachi Jain entered the vegan travel industry in 2016 and is now a cofounder of the Ahimsa Travel Club. Jain recently spoke with me about her previous company, Escape To, and why she decided to merge it with Kim Giovacco’s company, Veg Jaunts and Journeys. She also shared her goals for vegan outreach and her insights on why vegan travel is not solely about food. Our complete interview can be read here. Below are some highlights from our conversation. 

This post’s featured image is of Prachi Jain during a group tour in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Dynestee Fields: The Ahimsa Travel Club is a recent merger between Escape To, your travel company, and Veg Jaunts and Journeys, founded by Kim Giovacco. What inspired you and Kim to merge companies?

Prachi Jain: I think that we were doing a lot of similar types of tours. What I really respected and appreciated about Kim’s tours is that, oftentimes, she actually went to the destination and scouted out her favorite places and built an itinerary around that.

I’ve done the same thing. All of the destinations that we have, I’ve been there. Or I have a connection there. 

[Kim] kind of did that more so in Europe and the US and then parts of Asia, like South Korea and Singapore. And we [Escape To] were concentrating on mostly Asia, as well as Latin America. 

So I just thought, “Okay, we are doing a lot of similar work. It’s not easy to build itineraries from scratch.” 

Also, I think a big part of what we want to do is help the amazing people that work with us: our tour leaders, our trip leaders, our vendors. We just want to give them more jobs and more work, and one of the best ways for us to do that is to essentially be able to offer more frequent tours for them. 

  Jain stands with her Sri Lanka trip leader.

What we want to do in the Ahimsa Travel Club is also just really allow people to connect offline, outside of the tours; become friends; and visit each other.

DF: What was the original mission of Escape To? And your first travel company, Leave Your Mark? How have these missions carried over into the Ahimsa Travel Club?

PJ: I stopped working on Leave Your Mark in 2016. Because we were doing volunteer travel, it was essentially like a cross-cultural exchange so that volunteers could have meaningful travel experiences. You know, doing some volunteer work with water and environmental issues, or women’s education, girls’ education, women’s empowerment, and things like that. 

For Escape To, we carried that over. We decided to merge vegan travel with, again, a strong focus on cultural preservation.

So we were trying to always engage with Indigenous communities. For example, in Oaxaca, going to spend time with the Zapotec community and allowing that intersectionality [animal rights, human rights, environmentalism, and cultural preservation] to come through. 

I think the idea is now to, again, merge all of those things. 

We really want to triple down on having this be a community for vegans, or even nonvegans who are just curious about vegan lifestyles or just any lifestyle that allows you to reduce harm to animals and the environment. 

Jain, with her clients, visits an outdoor market during a tour.

Maybe that means more reunion dinners. Maybe that means events and things like that that happen all across the world. Maybe that means helping all of our vendors at one destination come together and have a dinner, and everybody gets connected. 

DF: So how does the mission of the Ahimsa Travel Club shape your choice of trip locations?

PJ: First of all, what I really love is off-the-beaten track destinations that folks wouldn’t always think about as a holiday. And then you go there and you’re like, “Oh wow, that was much better than I ever expected.”

For example, the first tour we ever launched was actually Bangalore and Coorg in India. I don’t think anybody has that on their bucket list.

So, I wanted to combat overtourism because the travel industry in general is having a huge problem with 90% of travelers only traveling to 10% of the destinations in this world.

That being said, we do have some core trips that are your basic bucket list ones. For example, we just have launched an Italy one, which is in Florence and Sicily. And, we have one coming up in Japan in Tokyo and Kyoto. 

DF: What takeaways have travelers had after going on your trips?

PJ: So when folks go on our India tour, it’s pretty transformative because you are traveling through time. From ancient India into modern India, from very rich India to very poor India. 

I think the takeaway that travelers have after India in particular is gratitude. Gratitude for their life and just really appreciation for what they have because they see a lot of people that don’t have a lot. That is hugely transformative. 

Mexico City. That’s the one that I think most people feel brings them back to life. It’s because it’s full of art. It’s full of just this vibrancy of dance and energy and bursts of flavor. Oftentimes with Mexico City, people will say, “Wow, I was in a bit of a lull before I came on the tour. And now I feel like I’ve come back to life.”

I guess each tour has its own takeaway. I think that’s what we try to foster as well: that each of the destinations that we do can help you discover something different about yourself and something different about the world.

DF: So this is a fascinating question. Beyond being a traveler, are there ways for people to get involved with the Ahimsa Travel Club?

PJ: Absolutely. What we want to do is allow folks to connect with us. Even if you are not able to travel internationally, we want you to be able to connect with us through eventual dinners that we might host. Like, reunion dinners but everybody’s welcome: old travelers and new travelers.

I would love to also highlight other vegan businesses. So if you have a vegan business that you want to promote, we have a really wonderful newsletter read by tons of vegans.

Beyond that, I think we’ll start to build more of that community: online and offline. So, maybe that means that we’ll meet up at VegFest. And we’ll just say, “Oh, everybody, we’re attending San Diego VegFest. Come if you can” and stuff like that. 

Then the one last thing that I’ll say is that we also do day hikes. So right now, we’re doing them mostly in Boston. We did it last year, I think last fall, and it was just a couple of hours. We got about eight or nine vegans together. People actually flew into Boston from D.C. and New Jersey and drove in from New York. And the whole idea was just to have a beautiful hike together. Have lunch together. 

DF: I do have another question. Are there any questions that I should have asked, but I didn’t?

PJ: I think I just wanted to talk a little bit about food. The vegan food and what I think Ahimsa Travel Club can do.

What I want to do with this travel company is to really be more mindful and thoughtful about the food that we’re consuming when we travel and trying to get locals to really dictate what veganism looks like in their country rather than forcing European or Western standards of what vegan food looks like.

Let’s try to think about having Indigenous plant-based dishes because the Indigenous people of most of the countries that we visit were plant-based and know what plant-based food is and are easily able to whip up plant-based dishes that are so much more delicious and so much more interesting than smoothie bowls and avocado toast.