In 1997, Chris Wrede and Steve Crowhurst, having gained extensive knowledge of the areas Oasis Overland travels through by leading trips for other companies, as well as their own independent adventures, decided the time was ripe to start their own overland venture.

Between them they managed to scrape together enough money to fund the building and equipping of one and a half overland trucks. So they bought their first truck, D650 NOX (affectionately known as ‘Noxy’) and completed building her in an old WW2 aircraft hanger near Cirencester in March 1998. They drove her out to Turkey to start her first trip in April that year, a 5 week ‘Oasis Caravan’ overland tour from Istanbul to Cairo. Noxy remained in the Middle East doing return trips for many years.

Back in the UK, Steve had purchased their second truck. By re-investing all the money they had earned from their first few Caravan trips in the Middle East, they completed building their second truck in June 1998 and had their first Africa overland truck. This ran a Nairobi to Cape Town overland trip and in March 1999 their next new truck ran their first Trans Africa Expedition. From here on they slowly built the company, putting ‘Frida’ their first overland vehicle into South America in 2001.

Since those early days they have continued to grow and find new areas to take intrepid travellers, with Central Asia being the latest region on the Oasis map. ....less

Our vehicles are built mainly in the UK, with practicality and comfort in mind. Experience has guided us to choose and design specific vehicles that are up to the job, with spacious lockers, roomy interiors and comfortable seating. Check out an example of our expedition vehicle layout. We have an excellent and enviable vehicle back-up and safety record. Regular maintenance is carried out by all our drivers during and in-between every trip. Should a mechanical problem occur we carry an extensive range of spare parts on board.

We will be running Your Trip!
On our Overland Adventure and Ultimate Expedition truck trips, we use expedition vehicles built by and for Oasis Overland, and employ crew who have driven and worked for Oasis for many years. On our Small Group adventures, we use a combination of our own Tour Leaders and local operators whom we have worked closely with over many years. ....less

Personal Service
We are small enough to offer a personalised service to those who travel with us, before & after you have booked. We enjoy talking to our travellers and you will speak to a real person. The original founder of Oasis, Chris, remains personally involved in running and managing all our overland expeditions.

Experience
We have been operating adventure tours and expeditions for over 20 years. Our crew and UK staff all have considerable knowledge, experience and enthusiasm for their work and for the countries and places we visit. Nearly all our Tour Leaders and Drivers join Oasis after having travelled with us or are experienced locally based crew. Our UK team have all travelled extensively and some have spent time living and working in some of our destinations.

Value For Money
By remaining small and compact we keep our UK overheads to a minimum. We don't spend money on expensive high street offices or have a large administrative or marketing team. All this contributes to considerable cost savings which are passed on to you, but in no way do they detract from the quality of your travelling experience with Oasis Overland.

Back-Up & Support
We have 24hr office backup & operational support as well as having full liability insurance and crisis management plans in place in the rare case of a major incident. ....less

We, at Oasis Overland, realise the important role we have to play in ensuring that our trips are run responsibly to maximise the potential benefits to local communities and minimise the negatives. We believe that our trips should benefit local people and their environments, or at the very least not harm them.

Tourism is said to be the world's largest employer accounting for about 10% of global GDP and employing over 10% of the world's workforce. Not only does it play a crucial role in world economics, it has a significant impact on many people's day to day lives. If managed well it can be used to preserve natural environments, wildlife and people’s lifestyles and help people climb out of poverty but if managed poorly it can destroy natural environments and habitats and lead to serious human rights abuses.

Our Environmental Policy:
Oasis Overland are very conscious of the delicate balance that exists, in many of the countries we visit, between the need for foreign investment and revenue from tourism and the needs of local environments and the wildlife and people that inhabit them.

We encourage our travellers to act in a responsible manner by providing written, displayed environmental guidelines on all our trucks and these are re-emphasised during a pre-departure talk, by our crew, at the start of all our trips. This information is also provided on our website in order to help travellers prepare for their trip in an environmentally responsible way. These include the appropriate disposal of litter and waste materials; water conservation; respecting and conserving wildlife and their habitats; purchasing of endangered species products and so on.

We attempt to reduce the use of single use plastic water bottles by carrying drinking water on all of our trucks and encourage our travellers to use the water supplied. Whilst away from the truck we encourage the use of a filter water bottle and we are able to offer Oasis Overland customers a 15% discount on Water-to-Go bottles and filters using the code OASIS15. A further 15% of the water bottle cost is donated to Oasis charities.

We recognize our travellers' need to fly to the start point of our trips but, by travelling overland following this initial flight, rather than using internal flights, we reduce our carbon footprint.

If possible we try to use suppliers and accommodation providers that share our environmental concerns, for example in Ecuador our groups stay at the Arajuno Jungle Lodge and Forest Reserve. This project not only runs its accommodation on sustainable principles but supports the local community in a variety of ways and has a forest reserve, including native species reproduction project.

When we use local operators to take our travellers into game parks we ensure that they abide by park rules for example not getting too close to the animals; keeping to speed limits.

Oasis is very aware of the environmental impact of our office in the UK, so we recycle and compost as much of our waste as possible. We try to reduce paper usage as much as possible, but when necessary we use recycled paper and stationery. Our brochure is available to view or download online and the paper version is printed on stock produced from sustainable sources and vegetable based inks. We encourage the use of public transport on work-related journeys. ....less

We follow ATTA Covid-19 health & safety guidelines.

Covid-19': We have carried out thorough risk assessments and made various changes to the way our trips operate to take account of the Covid-19 pandemic and to keep our travellers as safe and protected as possible. ....less

Trust My Travel; ATTA; ASTA ....less