Discover the 56 players, places, and bold new concepts moving the industry into the future. By CNT EditorsSeptember 7, 2022Play/Pause ButtonPauseCookie Moon. Art Direction by Pallavi KumarSave this storySaveSave this storySave
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There has never been a more important moment to recognize those shaping the future of travel. It's not just due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which transformed the industry, but also because of the racial reckoning of the last few years, which has reinforced the need for greater access and representation in travel; the rapid advance of technology; and the climate crisis. For the very first time, we're honoring people and businesses who are tackling these issues with fresh, creative thinking to bring us into the future across the realms of tech, design, sustainability, community, inclusion, accessibility, and conservation. From cities focused on urban regeneration and sweeping conservation programs in rural areas to carbon-conscious hotels and airlines introducing new inclusivity measures, these 56 innovators are changing the way we travel.
Read more about the Future of Travel here.
SECTIONS
Hotels | Destinations | Air Travel | Cruise | Rail Travel | Space Travel | Planning Tools | Organizations
BADGE KEY
Tech 🚀 | Design 📐 | Sustainability 🌱 | Community 👨👨👧 | Accessibility ♿ | Inclusion🤝 | Conservation 🦏
Cookie Moon
HOTELS
Hilton | 🤝
The idea: Hilton sets meaningful and transparent diversity targets—linking progress directly to corporate leadership compensation and reporting numbers in a public dashboard.
Details: Hilton is broadcasting its internal diversity numbers in a live dashboard for the public to track progress toward its targets. Like many hospitality brands, Hilton has publicly committed to improving the diversity of its workforce. In April 2021, it set a target to achieve global gender parity and employ 25 percent people of color at its corporate-leadership levels by 2027. The hotel brand has made the rare move of linking progress toward its diversity-hiring goals directly to leadership compensation—an obvious way to ensure these goals remain a priority long after the press release goes out.
Why it matters: Many brands set diversity targets, but Hilton sets a precedent for its transparency and accountability from the top down.
Red rock outcroppings frame a sleek pool at Habitas AlUla in Saudi Arabia’s Ashar Valley
Tom Parker
A bartender at Habitas AlUla
Tom Parker
Habitas | 📐 🌱
The idea: In once insular Saudi Arabia, this hospitality group aims to dramatically transform the country’s landscape, culture, and attitudes.
Details: After decades of restricting travel, Saudi Arabia opened to international visitors and is sharing its treasures with the world. While the restoration and opening of its ancient sites has been international news, the buzz about the area can also be attributed to the arrival of the trailblazing hospitality group Habitas. The brand, which caters to upscale hipsters seeking a wilderness hit (its 2016 flagship hotel is in Tulum), scattered 96 tented, light-touch villas across the area’s Ashar Valley, all decorated with local textiles and equipped with outdoor showers. Nearby is Caravan by Habitas, a newly launched collection of 22 Airstream trailers (and three food trucks) on a lush oasis arranged around tented common areas.
Why it matters: Habitas is just part of a growing number of high-end properties built to usher in this fresh age of tourism in Saudi Arabia. It will soon be joined by an outpost of Janu, the recently launched sister brand to Aman, and Sharaan Desert Resort, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel.
Villa exteriors at Rancho Pescadero
Albert Lewis
Rancho Pescadero | 👨👨👧👦 🌱
The idea: Fresh off a four-year renovation, this beachside resort has partnered with its local community to create a haven for regenerative and sustainable travel.
Details: When Lisa Harper opened Rancho Pescadero in 2009, the 12-room resort was a quiet escape in Todos Santos, a sleepy surf town on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Fast-forward to today, and both the town and hotel have exploded in the tourism world—the latter transforming into a 103-room property, complete with private plunge pools and wellness programs. To support hotel staff and the full-time community, the high-design resort has invested in 170 affordable homes (as well as a slew of educational opportunities) and gone green, adding a solar farm for energy.
Why it matters: Rancho Pescadero proves that hotels can (and should) enhance local communities. Aside from plans to be completely solar-powered within the next three years, the resort is introducing a new composting program to the region, manufacturing organic bamboo straws for local businesses, and working with local sanitation providers to ensure proper waste disposal.
Slow | 👨👨👧👦
The idea: Slow has drawn on the insights of the slow movement to build a group of hotels and hospitality offerings that invite a literal change of perspective.
Details: Through adaptive reuse, regenerative agriculture, and a community of designers, farmers, writers, artists, and architects, the collective seeks to “build and nourish locally rooted places that offer a deeper, more conscious form of hospitality.” To do this, the brand has established locations and gatherings in Mexico, Spain, Germany, and Portugal that offer immersive journeys that seek to reconnect one with nature, oneself, and the shared human experience—not just an escape from the hectic day-to-day. Cofounded by tourism mogul Claus Sendlinger, who founded Design Hotels, the four organic modern properties utilize decor and materials sourced from the surrounding local communities and the collective of creatives that make up Slow.
Why it matters: Their ethos—as it appears on their website—while harkening back to simpler times, is surely one future for the travel space: “To be slow is not merely to decrease the pace of life. It’s about taking the time to reconsider our actions and think more deeply and responsibly about how we live.”
A guest room at Hotel Marcel
Hotel Marcel
Hotel Marcel’s architectural exterior
Hotel Marcel
Hotel Marcel | 📐 🌱
The idea: Two miles from the imposing pseudo-Gothic towers of Yale, this long-vacant 1970 brutalist monolith by Bauhaus master Marcel Breuer has received a second life as the first fossil-fuel-free hotel in the United States.
Details: Connecticut architects Becker + Becker acquired the building from IKEA, ripped out asbestos, and restored the distinctive façade. Brooklyn studio Dutch East Design transformed offices and research labs into minimalist concrete-gray-and-caramel rooms and lobbies. Now Marcel lives under the Tapestry Collection by Hilton as a 165-room hotel, which is expected to be Passive House-certified by 2023. “The beauty of Breuer’s precast concrete is that it lends itself to the triple-glazing system and thermal insulation required for a Passivhaus system based on centuries-old efficient heating and cooling building methods,” explains Dieter Cartright of Dutch East Design. Solar paneling and a cunning Power over Ethernet (PoE) lighting system provide energy—and it’s also conserved, with electronic shade treatments, all-electric kitchens, and other eco-ploys.
Why it matters: Hotel Marcel is on track to qualify as America’s first net-zero hotel by 2023, creating a crucial blueprint for the country’s hospitality industry.
Churchill Wild | 🦏
The idea: While primarily known for their polar bear safaris, outfitter Churchill Wild is introducing travelers to an even more elusive species: the cloud wolf.
Details: Not only does this Manitoba, Canada-based tour operator give travelers a glimpse of the otherwise inaccessible Hudson Bay Lowlands, but it also allows guests to contribute to the study and preservation of species. Churchill Wild’s newest safari, launched in 2021 and titled Cloud Wolves of the Kaska Coast, focuses on the Canis lupus nubilus, a subspecies so remote that no scientists have studied it—and Wikipedia erroneously lists it as extinct. Along with a team of naturalist guides and expert photographers, guests (or “citizen scientists”) embark on 10-day expeditions, snapping photos and taking data-centric notes that are sent to scientists to help keep tabs on the animals. It fits perfectly with the brand’s ethos to simultaneously minimally impact and improve the fragile ecosystems of the Arctic.
Why it matters: With melting ice caps and a climate that is constantly affecting Arctic wildlife, seeing wolves in the wild is not only a bucket list experience—it’s an increasingly urgent one that needs to be preserved.
The newly renovated cabins at Camp V
Casey Nay/Camp V
CampV | 👨👨👧👦
The idea: A 1940s mining camp has been transformed into a destination glamping retreat dedicated to bringing art to rural communities.
Details: When the mines of southwest Colorado closed in the 1970s, some boomtowns—like Telluride—were able to reinvent themselves as ski resorts. Others, like Naturita, went bust. In 2017, Telluride-based real estate agent Natalie Binder purchased Naturita’s dilapidated mining camp and, with the help of two architects, spent four years repurposing the 120-acre site as an art retreat. Opened in April 2021, CampV hosts guests in historic cabins, Airstreams, and bell tents, and offers dynamic cultural programming (movies, concerts, art workshops, and more) rarely seen in remote communities. The project was recently awarded $2 million from the Colorado Community Revitalization Grant initiative, which will be used to fund a public arts-and-event space set to debut by the end of 2023.
Why it matters: Repurposing abandoned boomtowns for tourism revitalizes forgotten places with jobs, creativity, and a sense of community.
Tsingpu | 📐 👨👨👧 🦏
The idea: Tsingpu has found a way to preserve, honor, and showcase traditional Chinese elements—both aesthetic and cultural—through its thoughtful modern retreats.
Details: This series of luxury boutique retreats was founded in 2015 by Wang Gongquan, a Chinese real estate mogul and civil rights activist. Tsingpu joined Design Hotels (a Marriott subsidy) in 2018, transforming rural properties from niche hideaways into mainstream entities. All three remote accommodations—Tsingpu Tulou Retreat, Tsingpu Yangzhou Retreat, and Tsingpu Lijiang Baisha Retreat—are located near significant cultural attractions and feature traditional Chinese architecture. To say that the properties blend seamlessly into their surroundings is no hyperbole: Tsingpu Yangzhou Retreat’s design called for adaptive reuse of structures with a few thoughtful additions, making the entire complex resemble the courtyard houses you’d find in any given Chinese village. Along with the traditional design, the hotels offer hyper-local classes and activities, ranging from paper-cutting classes and cooking demonstrations to expert-led hikes and visits to mountaintop temples.
Why it matters: Tsingpu is a model for how to preserve and emphasize culture as a hospitality brand—and could influence a change in the priorities of Chinese travelers—and travelers to China—in favoring traditional over modern, rural over urban, and local over global.
Six Senses Svart on Norway’s Helgeland coastline
MIRIS
Six Senses Svart | 📐 🌱
The idea: A true glimpse into hotels of the future, Six Senses Svart will produce more energy than it uses.
Details: Snøhetta, a Norwegian architecture studio, has led the design industry with its supercool, sustainably minded projects over the past several years. (We’re talking about the firm behind Under, the headline-grabbing underwater restaurant that opened on Norway’s southern coast in 2019.) Also in Snøhetta’s portfolio: Six Senses Svart, a 94-room ring-shaped hotel set to open on Norway’s Helgeland coastline in 2024. Aside from being an architectural marvel, the hotel is on track to become the world’s first energy-positive hotel. It will harvest more solar energy than it needs to operate, making it entirely off-grid and self-sustaining, with its own waste and water management, recycling, and renewable infrastructure.
Why it matters: In the 21st century, excellent food and design is no longer enough. More and more, new hotels like Six Senses Svart are focusing on big issues (read: sustainability) that hold importance to informed global citizens.
Marriott | 📐
The idea: The world’s largest hotel chain is partnering with robotics companies (yes, really) to pave the way for futuristic guest rooms where people can live and work.
Details: While many small and independent companies are drawing up blueprints for what future hotels will look like, big brands are also rethinking the very meaning of hospitality. This fall, at its Bethesda, Maryland, headquarters, Marriott will open its state-of-the-art Design Lab, 10,000 square feet of research space that will be used as an R&D playground where partners like LG Electronics, Carrier, and a constellation of start-ups can ideate and optimize hotel-room design. A recent partnership with Ori—an architecture and robotics company—yielded a guest-room prototype in which the desk pulls out from the wall and the bed ascends to the ceiling, seamlessly transitioning the bedroom into an office.
Why it matters: During the pandemic, hotels everywhere made technological leaps to adapt to the times, and now things like contactless check-in and QR-code room-service menus are givens. But what about what’s next? As the past two and a half years have shown, the ways we live and travel can change rapidly, which is why hotels are hard at work designing the guest experience of the future.
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Aerial view of DistrictHive
Dani Guindo.jpg)
The kitchen at DistrictHive
Dani Guindo
DistrictHive | 📐 🌱
The idea: A completely self-sustaining, off-the-grid accommodation that can easily be replicated with minimal impact on the natural environment.
Details: Perched along a desert gorge in the Sierra Nevada mountains in Granada, Spain, lies a mostly glass “podtel.” The rectangular space shuttle-inspired structure makes enough energy to run four days without the sun, gathers up to 250 liters of water out of the air every day, and converts all waste into ash and irrigation water to be safely discarded. Everything in the house is powered with artificial intelligence that automatically adjusts energy consumption. A DistrictHive app controls the lighting, sound, temperature, and even scents with a touch of a finger. Each capsule hotel is fully transportable and can be deployed on any terrain, even where construction is not possible—and if removed, there will be no impact on the natural environment.
Why it matters: DistrictHive looks to launch similar pods elsewhere in the years to come while inspiring others to create self-sustaining short-term rentals.
Cookie Moon
DESTINATIONS
Mossman Gorge Centre | 🌱 👨👨👧👦 🤝
The idea: Australia’s Daintree rain forest is one of the longest continuously occupied regions on Earth, and descendants of those who lived there first are shaping how the world interacts with their ancestral homeland.
Details: Between 2013 and 2019, interest in Indigenous-led tourism from domestic and international visitors rose 40 percent in Australia. This momentum helped many regain custody of their ancestral lands—including the hand-back of Daintree to its traditional custodians, the Eastern Kuku Yalanji people, who now manage the national park alongside the Queensland state government. Strengthening this watershed moment for Indigenous-led tourism is the Mossman Gorge Centre, an ecotourism hub whose workforce is 73 percent Indigenous. Before the center opened, tourists would tear through the region, crashing their motorbikes and disturbing the peace with loud parties. Now, walking the land with a traditional custodian as a guide is not only infinitely more respectful, but it also opens travelers’ eyes to wildlife and folklore-ridden landmarks they never would have seen otherwise.
Why it matters: Spending time with these traditional custodians is a reminder of just how much landscapes can command awe and demand reverence—and just how far other countries have to go when it comes to land hand-backs.
Clockwise from left:
Street art on Weena, a major thoroughfare; De Zure Bom restaurant at Weelde, a complex just outside the city center; inside Stadshaven Brouwerij; Weelde’s skate park
Chris Schalkx
The Luchtsingel, an elevated walkway that connects the Schieblock building to the former Hofplein train station
Chris Schalkx
Rotterdam | 📐
The idea: Rotterdam was taken down to the studs during World War II. Three quarters of a century later, Europe’s largest port town has earned a new image as a city of the future.
Details: While Amsterdam, Utrecht, and The Hague have long been bastions of the arts and cultural wealth, Rotterdam was seen as a no-frills workers’ city up until about a decade ago. It’s possible to trace the beginning of the city’s evolution into a pioneer of thoughtful urban regeneration to 2007, when Rotterdam joined C40 Cities, a network of 96 metropolises worldwide that confront climate change with ambitious, target-based actions. It has since reinforced its commitment to environmental action, signing its own Climate Agreement in 2019 to halve CO2 and greenhouse-gas emissions by 2029. Steps towards that goal have materialized in the city, from breweries that make beer with rainwater to a space-saving Floating Farm perched atop the harbor.
Why it matters: By investing in green spaces and incentivizing smart design, Rotterdam has not only caught up to its cosmopolitan Dutch siblings, but it has also become a leader in its own right—and honestly, it all looks so good we imagine other cities will want to follow suit.
Duke University Press | 👨👨👧👦 🤝
The idea: Detours is a series of destination guides unlike any other—one that, as the introduction to its inaugural Hawaii guide states, “does not put tourist desires at the center.”
Details: Rather than making it easier for travelers to parachute in and mine destinations for picture-perfect experiences, Detours invites readers to learn about the complex past and present of places they visit—effectively, to consider the reality behind postcard images. The first installation in the series is a nearly 500-page tome on Hawaii which includes personal essays, artwork, maps, and even tour itineraries from dozens of local contributors aimed at entirely changing how travelers understand the islands. A Detours guide to Guam is next, expected for release in 2024, with editions on Palestine, Singapore, and Korea to follow. At a time when travelers want more than ever to learn from locals in the places they visit, this series is a satisfying reply.
Why it matters: It’s rare to find such an honest, deeply informative overview of a destination; the Detours guide to Hawaii should be required reading for anyone planning to visit the islands, and the same will surely be true of future Detours issues about other spots.
The 161,000-square-foot garden at Singapore’s ParkRoyal Collection Pickering hotel
The 161,000-square-foot garden at Singapore’s ParkRoyal Collection Pickering hotel
Meric Dagli/Unsplash
Singapore | 🌱
The idea: Already one of the greenest cities in the world, Singapore has a detailed plan in place to become the sustainable city of the future by 2030.
Details: Lee Kuan Yew, the city’s first prime minister, launched the idea of Singapore as a garden city back in 1967. The initiative started as a tree-planting drive and has since evolved into a sustainability blueprint called the SGP 2030. Organized around five pillars of improvement for the next decade, it aims to promote city development while reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and increasing public adoption of cleaner forms of energy, such as solar. There are laudable short-term goals, like developing more than 300 acres of new parks and ensuring that every household is within a 10-minute walk of a green space; tripling the amount of cycling trails; developing a circular economy (like turning ash from trash incinerators into a sand alternative used for concrete); and more.
Why it matters: What’s more impressive is the long-term investment that the plan sets out, like funding training programs for future jobs in sustainable building, solar technology, and green finance.
Presidio Tunnel Tops | 📐 🌱 👨👨👧👦
The idea: In collaboration with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, the Presidio Tunnel Tops campaign raised $98 million to add 14 new acres to San Francisco’s national park of the same name.
Details: In 2014, co-chairs Lynne Benioff, Mark Buell, and Randi Fisher established one of the largest fundraising campaigns for public open space in the city’s history. The project was not only dedicated to the local community but also led by the community; from the organizers’ interactions with people yearning to use the public space, things like sustainable design and youth programs rose to the top. Now, after the free-to-use site opened in July, 200,000 plants have been planted using state-of-the-art irrigation practices that maximize water conservation for the desert area and three buildings have been built (or rehabbed) to create centers for youth programming, like sensory-based science activities and environmental literacy.
Why it matters: Using public space to serve the local communities first, and in a positive way, will also draw tourists and develop economic support.
Klahoose Wilderness Resort
Klahoose Wilderness Resort/Destination Canada
Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada | 🌱 👨👨👧👦 🤝 🦏
The idea: This nonprofit is bringing Indigenous-owned companies to the forefront of Canada’s tourism industry.
Details: Founded in 2015, this nonprofit in Vancouver has partnered with industry leaders and government organizations to boost Indigenous-based tourism across the country. Members of the ITAC consist of tourism businesses in all 10 provinces and the three territories, ranging from art galleries to wildlife tour companies. While COVID-19 put a pause on travel, ITAC has plans to get its membership numbers back to pre-pandemic levels—including 1,900 Indigenous-owned businesses and 40,000 Indigenous tourism employees—by 2025.
Why it matters: Boosting Indigenous representation in the tourism sector not only benefits local communities, but it also accurately reflects travelers’ growing interest in authentic, sustainable, and nonintrusive tourism helmed by the people who know their country the best.
Neom | 🚀 📐 🌱
The idea: In the current moment, there are any number of plans afoot to create model metropolises. One of the most ambitious is Neom, an almost statelike entity that will occupy a Belgium-size swath of land in the northwest of Saudi Arabia.
Details: For nearly as long as there have been cities, there have been efforts to create ideal cities—and the desire endures. Neom is perhaps the grandest of all the “gigaprojects” of the Saudi Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund. (Another, the “entertainment city” called Qiddiya, with a Six Flags park, was master-planned by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels’s firm BIG.) Neom exists as a series of renderings for now, but the $500 billion plan consists of a streetless “linear city,” a tourism complex with a man-made lake and year-round skiing, and a floating industrial complex (also the work of BIG) boasting 100 percent clean energy. Neom is hardly the first project to propose buoyant urbanism as a response to climate-change scenarios, but it is by far the most ambitious, with a hopeful launch date of 2025.
Why it matters: The implication of Neom is that it can overcome, via smart planning and technological advances, some of the traditional contradictions that plague cities: It will be dense, but with access to nature; walkable without congestion.
Cookie Moon
AIR TRAVEL
Air4All | 🤝 ♿
The idea: This newly designed seating system aims to make air travel safer, more accessible, and more dignified for power-wheelchair users.
Details: Air travel poses a distinct hardship for many power-wheelchair users who are unable to roll their chairs onto a commercial aircraft. Air4All offers a practical solution. Unveiled in late 2021 by design firm PriestmanGoode, SWS Aircraft Certification, and campaigners Flying Disabled, Air4All is a game-changing seating and locking system that enables power-wheelchair users to board a plane and securely anchor their chair for the flight. When not in use by a power-wheelchair user, the system can easily convert back into front-row seating. Air4All is currently piloting the program with an airline subsidiary and plans to roll out the service more widely to major carriers within the next few years.
Why it matters: Air4All aims to eliminate a barrier that keeps many passengers with reduced mobility from flying.
Revolve Air’s folding wheelchair
Revolve Air
Revolve Air | 📐 🤝 ♿
The idea: Introducing a folding wheelchair so compact that it can fit in overhead airplane lockers—the first of its kind.
Details: Andrea Mocellin—the designer behind the original patent for the folding wheel—has created a wheelchair that’s a whopping 60 percent more compact than standard folding wheelchairs. The rim and spokes of the wheels fold down along their common axle, then tuck into the seatback unit, allowing for compact storage. According to Mocellin, it takes no longer to unfold a Revolve than any conventional folding chair. The first models are expected to become available for sale in late 2023 and will start at $2,500. Mocellin plans to also offer them to airports and train stations so they can be accessed by travelers, too.
Why it matters: Storing a Revolve Air wheelchair could be as easy as packing an item in an overhead locker, making it easier for wheelchair-using travelers to fly—and less likely for in-transit damage to occur.
Istanbul Airport | 🚀 📐
The idea: Create a “smart airport” with state-of-the-art technology that makes the passenger journey seamless and more intuitive.
Details: Since first opening its doors to fliers in 2018, the Istanbul Airport has continually added technology based on biometric data, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence to its terminals. Travelers will find innovations like e-passport gates, smart translation services, smart parking, smart security, and roaming robots focused on assisting travelers. Next up for the hub: rolling out facial recognition to eliminate the need for travel documents and simplifying each step of the journey, including improved security checkpoints, lounge access, boarding gates, and retail stores.
Why it matters: The smart airport concept reduces lines and wait times for passengers: A six-month trial of the biometric scanners found that the tech shortened boarding times by 30 percent and the passport e-gates verified travelers’ identities in as little as 18 seconds.
Alaska Airlines
Cody Fitzgerald/Unsplash
Alaska Airlines | 🤝
The idea: Alaska Airlines launches gender-neutral uniforms—the first U.S. carrier to do so, breaking down the industry’s rigid gender norms.
Details: Until recently, women-identifying flight attendants were prohibited from wearing ties on Alaska Airlines flights, and nonbinary employees had to conform to narrowly defined “male” or “female” attire. That was due to the strict and rigid uniform and grooming policies that remain commonplace at many major airlines. Thankfully, that’s starting to change. In March, Alaska Airlines replaced its binary uniform and grooming categories with revised policies. No longer must employees adhere to arbitrary norms such as wearing scarves versus ties or makeup versus tinted moisturizer. Additionally, the airline commissioned Seattle designer Luly Yang to develop new, genderless uniform pieces. These actions show the airline constructively responding to allegations raised by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2021 that Alaska’s former policies were discriminatory.
Why it matters: This important step toward gender equity in the industry makes the workplace less hostile toward nonbinary and gender-nonconforming employees.
JSX | 🚀
The idea: JSX offers “hop-on jet service” throughout the U.S., initially focusing on the West Coast and since expanding to Colorado, New York, Florida, and other spots over the past year.
Details: “Time and simplicity are the ultimate luxuries,” says Alex Wilcox, who founded JSX in 2016. One of the company’s biggest perks is cutting down time spent at the airport. Check-in happens 20 minutes before departure, with features like valet parking and speedy thermal scanning in lieu of TSA screenings—and you can find one-way tickets as low as $249. Carriers like JSX cut costs and time by flying out of smaller airports, and many are working with the major airlines, forging code-sharing and reciprocal travel-booking arrangements. And don’t worry about the size of your carbon footprint: JSX’s planned expansion relies on small hybrid, electric, and hydrogen-powered planes.
Why it matters: Perhaps the greatest proof of JSX’s success is that its routes are increasingly influencing travelers’ vacation choices. “It’s not just making something they already wanted to do easier—now we’re changing behavior,” says Wilcox.
Pittsburgh International Airport | 📐 🌱
The idea: This is the first major U.S. airport to be completely powered by its own microgrid, fueled by natural gas and solar energy.
Details: In July 2021, officials at Pittsburgh International Airport switched on an independent power grid built exclusively for the facility. The so-called microgrid runs off energy from five natural gas wells and nearly 10,000 solar panels perched atop a repurposed landfill. In its first year of operation, it saved the airport $1 million in energy costs. The project has been so successful, airport officials are considering doubling the number of solar panels in the near future. In addition to saving money, the microgrid cut PIT’s carbon dioxide emissions by a whopping 8.2 million pounds per year.
Why it matters: Aside from cutting down on energy costs, the project also means the airport is much less susceptible to power outages or cyberattacks, which have shut down other major hubs in the past.
One of Aero’s private jets
Courtesy Aero
Aero Technologies | 🚀
The idea: With first-class flights between private terminals across the world, Aero is one of several semiprivate carriers trying to restore the lost luster of 1950s air travel.
Details: “There’s an opportunity to make flying magical again,” says Uma Subramanian, CEO of Aero Technologies, which launched in 2019 with a focus on underserved routes connecting premium leisure destinations, such as Ibiza to Mykonos. The company expanded to North America in 2021, offering flights from Los Angeles to Aspen and Los Cabos (among others). Though one-way tickets start around $1,080 and reach up to $2,500, the experience reflects the price tag: Think hand-stitched Italian leather seats (16 per plane), a bar, and a boarding process free from long security lines and strict baggage policies.
Why it matters: Companies like Aero aim to eliminate the hurdles and hassles of flying today, with streamlined check-in and breeze-through security, often at rates that are squarely within the realm of affordability for many travelers.
Hidden Disabilities Sunflower | 🤝 ♿
The idea: Within the last several years, the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower lanyard program has scaled to North American airports—making air travel more accessible to travelers with non-visible disabilities.
Details: Travelers with hidden disabilities face many challenges when flying, especially when navigating stressful and hectic airport environments. The Sunflower lanyard program gives travelers a discreet symbol that indicates to staff that they may need additional assistance or time. Pioneered at London’s Gatwick Airport in 2016, the program first touched down in North America in mid-2020 and has since expanded into many of the continent’s major air-travel hubs, such as John F. Kennedy International Airport (specifically, Terminal 4) and Toronto Pearson International Airport, with others, including Boston Logan, forthcoming. By quickly extending its network to over 160 airports around the world, with more than 60 in the U.S. and Canada, the program creates a common system and consistent experience for travelers with hidden disabilities. It gives lanyard-wearers the confidence that they can receive support when they travel independently.
Why it matters: The widespread adoption of the Sunflower lanyard keeps travelers with hidden disabilities from having to explain themselves, making flying less stressful.
United Airlines | 🤝
The idea: The carrier aims to increase racial and gender diversity among its ranks via its newly launched pilot academy.
Details: In January 2022, United Airlines became the first major U.S. carrier to open its own flight school. This is one way it hopes to address the national pilot shortage, which has made hiring difficult for most airlines in recent years. But United has bolder ambitions: It’s committed that 50 percent of the pilots trained and hired through its United Aviate Academy by 2030 will be women and people of color. To achieve these goals, United Airlines is working with groups such as the Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals (OBAP) and Sisters in the Sky, and partnering with JP Morgan Chase to offer $2.4 million in scholarships to make the program more accessible to a diverse cohort of students.
Why it matters: The airline plans to boost racial and gender equity in the industry by tackling the various barriers that have historically blocked many would-be pilots.
Cookie Moon
CRUISE
Hurtigruten Group | 🤝
The idea: The Norwegian cruise line diversifies its media campaigns and creative talent pool to boost Black representation.
Details: Cruise companies often exclude the Black community from their campaigns. Recognizing these shortcomings, Hurtigruten Group is committed to working with Black content creators in every media campaign—but this focus on representation is only one step for the global cruising brand, known for its popular Antarctic cruises. In February, it announced the formation of its Black Traveler Advisory Board, a first for an expedition-cruising brand. The founding six-member board includes respected leaders like Martinique Lewis, the Black Travel Alliance’s president; Stephanie Jones, founder and CEO of the Cultural Heritage Economic Alliance; and Naledi Khabo, CEO of the Africa Tourism Association. In addition to compensating each board member, Hurtigruten has publicly committed to funding Black-led organizations in tourism with $5,000 to each inaugural member’s venture of choice.
Why it matters: The move brings together a diverse group of Black travel professionals to advise Hurtigruten on better serving Black travelers while also leading conversations across the industry.
The Marquee, a food a drinks venue on Silversea’s Silver Nova
Silversea Cruises
Silversea | 🚀 📐 🌱
The idea: Thanks to a mix of hybrid technology, Silversea’s Silver Nova will be the first low-emissions luxury cruise ship in the brand’s new fleet when it launches next July.
Details: This cruise ship will be entirely emissions-free while at port (marking an industry first), with suites that generate 40 percent fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than the company’s previous class of ships. The fleet can achieve these results through powering the vessels with liquid natural gas (which emits 97 percent fewer particles than CO2), shore power, hydrogen-based cells, and a hydrodynamic design. And it accomplishes all of this without sacrificing the luxurious cabins and attentive service to which guests have become accustomed during a Silversea sailing.
Why it matters: With these strides in innovation, Silversea is setting a high bar for the industry, leading it toward a more sustainable standard.
Cookie Moon
RAIL TRAVEL
Swiss Federal Railways | 🚀
The idea: When Switzerland’s GoldenPass Express (a line on Swiss Federal Railways) launches in December, it will mark the first time in history that a train will be able to switch between different types of tracks.
Details: Rather than tearing up and replacing track—which would be a lengthy and challenging process that would interrupt the route completely—the SBB decided to partner with Alstom to create a variable gauge bogie. The contraption has the ability to expand and raise, allowing the train to change from what is called the metric track to the normal track while adapting to the different platform heights. This has been a conversation for more than a century, and the result will connect Montreux in the west with Interlaken in the east allowing for quicker and more sustainable routes.
Why it matters: The innovation could easily revolutionize international train travel by allowing additional nonstop routes, especially between European countries that have different rail sizing.
A suite on-board the Orient Express La Dolce Vita
Dimorestudio
Accor | 📐
The idea: The long-standing French hospitality company (parent to brands like Sofitel and Raffles) has big plans to bring back the nostalgic glamour of train travel.
Details: Since its founding in 1967, Accor’s portfolio features thousands of hotels and luxury brands in 110 countries—and the company continues to move forward while looking toward the past. In 2023, Accor will get in on the nostalgia, launching Orient Express La Dolce Vita, six trains inspired by Italy’s glamorous 1960s, on routes including Rome to Paris; Split, Croatia; and Istanbul. The train will feature 12 deluxe cabins, 18 suites (plus one “Honor Suite”), and a restaurant, all sumptuously decorated with retro furniture and Italian textiles. Trips are expected to run between one to three days, and reservations will open in November 2022.
Why it matters: Since the pandemic, travelers are increasingly embracing slow travel and the notion that taking trains can reduce their carbon footprints (per passenger, planes emit roughly two to three times more carbon than trains).
Cookie Moon
SPACE TRAVEL
Orbite | 🚀
The idea: French company Orbite is turning our growing appetite for extraterrestrial exploration into a luxury experience.
Details: For decades, the idea of commercial space travel existed only in the realm of fantasy. No longer. Tech entrepreneurs Nicolas Gaume and Jason Andrews founded Orbite in 2019 so people could get a taste of the zero-gravity experience before dropping fortunes on space vacations available to the world’s most affluent travelers. During Orbite’s four-day astronaut-training courses, attendees participate in a kind of space boot camp (a luxe boot camp, where meals feature lobster and 1969 Mumm Champagne), hopping on zero-gravity flights, studying rocket science, and taking part in virtual-reality simulations. “You have to have a certain amount of training to be able to go through an experience in space,” says Gaume. “But what we really want is for you to have fun and enjoy every bit of it, with an experience that focuses not just on the technical but also the mental and spiritual.” Camps are based on France’s Atlantic coast and in Orlando, Florida. The company has commissioned Philippe Starck to design a permanent training complex in an as-yet-undisclosed U.S. location in 2024.
Why it matters: While the arrival of space tourism isn’t a surprise, the velocity of change is very quick—including Orbite’s foray into ultra-luxe training camps.
SpaceX rendering of Red Dragon on Mars
SpaceX
SpaceX | 🚀
The idea: Elon Musk has big plans to colonize Mars; but for now, the billionaire’s spacecraft company is working on taking tourists around the moon by 2023.
Details: While noteworthy, it wasn’t too surprising when four executives hired SpaceX to get them to the International Space Station for a 17-day stay this past April—the first fully commercial visit to the station. For more than a decade, Elon Musk’s plan has been to take non-trained astronauts (albeit ones with huge pocketbooks) to space. The SpaceX CEO tends to wax poetic about multiplanet civilizations—and the company’s much-touted Starship, a low-orbit “cruise liner” that carried out flight trials in Texas this past summer, will eventually take tourists to Mars—but for now, the company has its sights set squarely on Earth’s moon. NASA has already booked Starship to send two American astronauts to the lunar surface as early as 2025, including the first woman to step foot on the moon.
Why it matters: A constant backdrop to SpaceX’s efforts is the idea that real trips to space are getting closer and more possible—even if a journey into orbit still costs north of $55 million.
Blue Origin | 🚀
The idea: This Jeff Bezos-backed spaceflight company now regularly takes tourists on 10-minute flights into space, with just a few days’ training.
Details: Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, and the company has been developing suborbital and orbital technology for the past two decades. Shortly after Bezos took his inaugural orbit in 2021, the company’s New Shepard vessel began operating commercial flights. Each 10-minute journey takes tourists 62 miles above the West Texas wilderness, before stopping just beyond the Kármán line (which some agencies consider the edge of space) so passengers can briefly experience weightlessness at the edge of the infinite darkness. New Shepard’s latest launch took place on August 4, carrying American YouTube stars and Egyptian biomedical engineers.
Why it matters: While each astrotourism company offers something different, the common thread is the same: opening up space for humanity—without a professional astronaut’s level of training.
Virgin Galactic’s spaceplane SpaceShipTwo
Courtesy Virgin Galactic
Virgin Galactic | 🚀
The idea: Richard Branson’s company is taking reservations for 90-minute flights, set to launch next year.
Details: Founded by Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic has been at the forefront of commercial spaceflight since 2004. After decades of test flights and delays, the company has finally started taking reservations for 90-minute space flights, with plans to launch in spring 2023. Each $450,000 trip is more like a futuristic plane ride than a traditional, preparation-heavy rocket launch: Passengers board a space plane at New Mexico’s state-of-the-art Spaceport America, which will take off from a runway and climb to 50,000 feet before receiving a Mach 3 boost into space. Once there, they will enjoy several minutes of zero-gravity sightseeing before strapping back in for the 62-mile descent back to Earth.
Why it matters: The charismatic billionaire’s desire to see the world from a different perspective is infectious, indeed: Virgin Galactic already has a customer pool of around 700 people, with another 800 placed on a wait list. Considering that only somewhere around 600 people have ever been to space in the history of humanity, this is clearly a huge leap forward.
Axiom | 🚀
The idea: A Houston-based company of predominantly ex-NASA staff is building the world’s first commercial space station.
Details: Axiom has been around since 2016, but the company most recently made headlines when it backed the private SpaceX flight that took four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) in April 2022. They are now building the first commercial space station (due to open in early 2024), with accommodations designed by Philippe Starck. It will connect to the ISS before separating when the station is retired around 2030. And while the ISS is literally unattached to Earth, the work and research performed on the vessel bring real benefits to humanity on the ground.
Why it matters: Allowing more people with different backgrounds passage to the ISS will, in theory, break new ground in the fields of drugs and medicine, stem cell research, age-related diseases, and much more.
Space Perspective exterior
Space Perspective
Space Perspective | 🚀 🌱
The idea: Using carbon-neutral, balloon-like spaceships, Space Perspective not only has plans to take tourists on luxury trips past Earth’s atmosphere, but it also dreams of eliminating human environmental impacts on the planet completely.
Details: Cape Canaveral-based Space Perspective is the brainchild of Jane Poynter and Taber MacCallum, who met when training for the infamous Biosphere 2 vivarium in Arizona. They’re working on a capsule called Spaceship Neptune—they call it a “lounge”—that will carry eight people up 100,000 feet (19 miles) under a balloon. Instead of solid-fuel rockets, weightlessness, and g-forces, the six-hour trip will include two hours of gentle, carbon-neutral floating above 99 percent of the atmosphere, with your own cocktail bar and views of the curvature of Earth. The first commercial flights are due to start in 2024, with tickets starting at $125,000.
Why it matters: Space Perspective’s mission to limit the environmental impact of space exploration—plus the lower-than-expected ticket prices—makes galactic travel more accessible (and palatable) to a much wider audience.
EOS-X Space | 🚀
The idea: Entrepreneur Kemel Kharbachi has the goal of inventing a way to travel to space that doesn’t utilize rocket fuels and other emissions that are toxic to the environment.
Details: This eco-friendly space tourism company is scheduling commercial launches to space next year. The leading-edge vessel, which looks like a toy soldier’s parachute, offsets its minimal carbon footprint and uses helium and hydrogen—both zero-emission gasses—to generate the least possible impact with its stratospheric balloon-powered pods. Each capsule can host seven passengers and one crew member in a pressurized, temperature-controlled cabin with comfortable ergonomic seats, a lavatory, and a personal “control panel.” The five-hour experience begins at dawn, the capsule slowly rising to its cruising altitude (about 20 miles from the earth’s surface), where it’s possible to see the global curve and the darkness of space. So far, it will take off from Spain, Mexico, and the UAE—locations that were selected specifically for climate predictability.
Why it matters: Space travel is here. Companies in the new tourism space race must start with sustainability, and EOS-X Space is leading the charge.
Cookie Moon
PLANNING TOOLS
Booking.com | 🚀 🤝
The idea: The travel marketplace’s comprehensive training and certification program helps its global lodging properties respectfully welcome LGBTQ+ travelers.
Details: For several years, Booking.com has comprehensively researched the distinct challenges LGBTQ+ travelers face. Building on those insights, the marketplace has launched a dedicated hospitality training and certification system available to any accommodation listed on the platform. The Travel Proud program aims to address the unwelcoming and unsafe experiences many LGBTQ+ travelers report—50 percent of LGBTQ+ Americans have dealt with discrimination while traveling, according to Booking.com’s most recent survey. The program offers accommodation staff free online training that educates them on the LGBTQ+ travel experience and provides them with skills to more authentically welcome guests. To receive the Travel Proud badge—displayed on property pages—accommodation partners must make the “Travel Proud Customer Toolkit” available to all customer-facing team members and designate a representative who ensures staff are trained. And the program is scaling quickly: Since launching in August 2021, more than 10,000 properties across 95 countries and territories have completed the certification process.
Why it matters: Booking.com’s massive network of lodging properties means this certification program can effectively reach lodging properties on a global scale.
Fora Advisor Gaya Vinay
Fora
The Fora app
Fora
Fora | 🚀 👨👨👧👦
The idea: The “sell big or go home” ethos of the travel agency world is changing with Fora, a subscription-based digital platform where amateurs passionate about trip planning become travel advisers.
Details: Fora believes that people known as the go-to person for travel among their friends can also earn income from their advice—and even create a fun and passion-driven part- or full-time job. New York City-based Henley Vazquez launched the brand last year to empower advisers who aren’t traditional travel agents. Lawyers, teachers, psychologists, and stay-at-home moms make up a wait list of 30,000 people. These individuals, often side hustlers, will gain access to a training library and tools like an SEO-optimized profile page and automatic commission collection.
Why it matters: Fora empowers everyday travelers with the tools to utilize their first-hand expertise, diversify the buttoned-up industry, and open up another personal revenue stream.
Regenerative Travel | 🌱 🤝
The idea: Regenerative Travel empowers tourism to foster social and environmental impact.
Details: Regenerative Travel—cofounded by Amanda Ho in 2019—enables travelers, industry professionals, and destinations to use tourism as a force for good by reversing negative impacts and focusing on regeneration. In May, the company launched its RegenerativeTravel+ subscription to help travelers carefully consider their mindset when embarking on a journey, from packing and planning to experiencing places more authentically. The membership, which costs $99 per year, provides guidance and educational content, including destination guides, tour operators, and activities committed to regenerative work, and offers hotel credits and exclusives with partners like Jamaica’s Rockhouse Hotel and Bhutan’s Gangtey Lodge. “We believe that being a regenerative traveler starts with your intention and how you choose to engage with the destination,” says Ho.
Why it matters: With these values in mind, Ho hopes to encourage the broader industry’s transition to more regenerative models.
One of Origin’s custom-made adventures in Antarctica
Kelvin Trautman
Origin App | 🚀 👨👨👧👦
The idea: The new Origin app offers a truly tech-first travel experience by pairing users with an expert travel curator to plan your dream trip.
Details: The questionnaire is what sets Origin apart from other online travel-planning services. The roughly 10-minute process asks you about basics like pricing, location, and duration, but then dives into personal interests such as travel priorities and previous trip favorites to help its own staff of eight (human) travel experts create a completely customized itinerary. Once all is planned, you can access everything on the app, in one place, before, during, and after the vacation—from information around COVID-19-related requirements to dinner reservations. The best part is that the app learns from your previous trips and applies this information for even more tailored suggestions in the future, making it perhaps the smartest innovation in digital trip planning.
Why it matters: Overall, the app cuts down the effort of trip planning for a tech-savvy audience.
Planeterra | 🌱 👨👨👧👦
The idea: This organization’s new grant program, the Global Community Tourism Fund, supports community-based tourism initiatives, ultimately making the future of travel more responsible and equitable.
Details: Tourism generates some $8 trillion globally, yet local communities barely see a sliver, if any, of it. Planeterra has spent two decades working to fix that—the Toronto-based NGO bolsters small, community-owned tourism enterprises around the world with training, logistical support, and mentorship. Planeterra’s new initiative, the Global Community Tourism Fund, is one of the industry’s first programs to provide grants ranging from $1,500 to $3,000 specifically for community-based tourism organizations. It awarded grants to seven businesses during its first funding round in May, including Lavender Jeep Siem Reap, a Cambodian adventure outfitter led by female entrepreneurs, and ASTURS PERÚ, a Peruvian homestay network operated by local Indigenous families. “Most of these are fairly small grants that have a huge impact in relieving out-of-pocket expenses for small community enterprises,” says Tricia Schers, the NGO’s director of partnerships and development.
Why it matters: Many community-tourism enterprises struggle to secure bank loans; this program helps fill that funding gap, providing grants to help local entrepreneurs and communities benefit from tourism.
Sammy Ocheng Akatch, a guide at Kenya’s andBeyond Bataleur
Julien Capmeil
Beyond Green’s Ashford Castle in County Mayo, Ireland
Robert Streeter
Beyond Green | 📐 🌱
The idea: An offshoot of parent company Preferred Hotel Group, Beyond Green is a global portfolio of hotels, resorts, and lodges leading the charge in sustainability.
Details: If a Relais & Châteaux hotel is measured by the quality of its spa and the prestige of its Michelin-starred restaurants, then a Beyond Green property can be judged by its carbon-emission benchmarks, hiring practices, and use of locally sourced materials. “Moving forward, the successful hotels will be the ones that really invite guests to actively be a part of something, and to be able to feel the impact that they’re having while they’re there,” says Lindsey Ueberroth, CEO of Preferred Hotel Group. The collection currently features 26 properties around the world—like The Brando in French Polynesia, which cosponsored the island nation’s recent Blue Climate Summit, and Vermejo Reserve in New Mexico, which has restored and preserved more than 500,000 acres of natural habitat and provides guests with guided conservation tours.
Why it matters: By collating these properties under one banner, Beyond Green has done the legwork for environmentally minded guests looking for an eco-hotel—a blueprint other hotel consortiums can follow to make it easy for travelers to choose the best place to stay.
Airbnb | 🤝 ♿
The idea: With its accessibility reviews powered by a team of specialists, Airbnb aims to personally verify every rental’s accessibility features.
Details: An unfortunately common issue physically disabled people face when they travel is arriving at a vacation home to find it isn’t as accessible as advertised—something that can make booking short-term rentals a stressfully inconsistent experience. It’s a problem Airbnb hopes to eliminate with its accessibility reviews. Introduced in late 2021 alongside streamlined accessibility search filters, the new review process requires hosts to upload photos of any accessibility features they list, ranging from step-free entrances and showers to ceiling and mobile hoists. In the past year, Airbnb’s team of dedicated accessibility specialists has manually reviewed and verified 150,000 accessibility features in nearly 100,000 listings around the world.
Why it matters: Unlike hotels, short-term vacation rentals are not closely regulated for accessibility—Airbnb’s accessibility reviews set a new standard for the short-term rental market.
AccessNow | ♿
The idea: This pioneering accessibility app is mapping trails to empower people of all abilities to explore the outdoors.
Details: Stretching 17,000 miles, the Trans Canada Trail is the longest network of multi-use paths in the world. Now there’s a new movement to use first-person reviews and artificial intelligence to identify which segments are accessible to people with disabilities. In 2021, it partnered with AccessNow—a tech platform that shares crowd-sourced accessibility data worldwide—to map its barrier-free paths, using insights from real people (some of them Paralympic athletes) and sensor and image data. Founded by Maayan Ziv, a Toronto-based activist, photographer, and entrepreneur with muscular dystrophy, AccessNow launched in 2015 as a grassroots tool to help people find and rate venues like restaurants and hotels based on accessibility features like ramps and braille. To date, the first-of-its-kind app has mapped about a million places worldwide in 35 countries.
Why it matters: A platform like AccessNow could be key in helping the world recognize the value of designing and promoting accessible-first experiences.
Cookie Moon
ORGANIZATIONS
Great Plains Conservation | 🦏
The idea: Project Rewild Zambezi is the biggest relocation of animals in history.
Details: Great Plains Conservation was cofounded in South Africa in 2006 by Dereck and Beverly Joubert, conservationists and filmmakers focused on big cats in the Okavango Delta. It’s now a standard-bearer in eco-luxury safari, with camps in Botswana, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. The Jouberts concentrate on emergency conservation in the fight against environmental degradation, mass extinction, and the effects of poaching and the bushmeat trade. The $5.5 million Project Rewild Zambezi, which launched in June 2022, centers on relocating 3,000 animals—including elephant herds, lions, buffalo, impalas, zebras, painted dogs, and eland—from the overpopulated Savé Valley Conservancy in Zimbabwe’s south to the hunting-degraded concession Sapi Reserve on the Zambezi. Guests at Great Plains’ Tembo Plains Camp can witness the conservation in action, too.
Why it matters: If successful, this will be a blueprint for safely moving—and saving—large numbers of animals in the future.
Dehouche | 🌱 👨👨👧👦 🦏
The idea: Thanks to a partnership with a newly created community-tourism experience based between five different Indigenous villages in Northern Brazil—a first of its kind in the country—trip operator Dehouche is allowing travelers to experience village life deep in the Amazon rain forest.
Details: Dehouche’s new community-based tourism itineraries promise a rare immersion in the remote territories of the Rio Negro, the Amazon River tributary named for its dark waters—albeit on these communities’ terms. The villages have organized collectively, and with the help of Brazilian NGO Instituto Socioambiental, share responsibilities for the different roles required to show visitors the best of the region and to make sure everyone is fairly compensated, from jungle guides and boat drivers to cooks, musicians, farmers, foragers, and artisans. Travelers can take a speedboat to villages where, until recently, outsiders were forbidden, where they might be joined by an anthropologist who can give insight into the local communities, or take hikes into the Serras Guerreiras mountains, where nights are spent in hammocks in a simple hut. Aside from delivering an unforgettable experience that provides a direct benefit to these communities, guests also learn firsthand about the Amazon’s many threats, from illegal farming and mining to drug trafficking.
Why it matters: From jump, these communities work hand in hand with Dehouche to design and approve itineraries and a pricing model—and in doing so, offers a reconceptualization of what “community-based tourism” means. This isn’t conventional luxury tourism that operates like an NGO or a charity; rather, it’s a community tourism model that ensures communities have an equal voice in setting the terms of tourism—and what they stand to gain—from the very beginning.
A sandbank on one of the 80 islands in the Whitsundays
Tom Hegen
The Great Reef Census | 🌱 👨👨👧👦 🦏
The idea: Using boats with existing routes along the Great Barrier Reef, a new citizen science project hopes to preserve one of the world’s most treasured places.
Details: The Great Barrier Reef has been affected by coral bleaching for years, but the hope that one of the natural world’s greatest wonders can be saved is growing. Part of a new wave of tourism operators focusing on the reef’s sustained health is environmentalist Andy Ridley, founder and CEO of Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef. In late 2020, he assembled what he calls a “motley flotilla” of any vessel he could find—from tour and dive boats to yachts and tugboats—to form the Great Reef Census. Using underwater cameras, participants on board document coral and marine life, then upload their images so that scientists around the world can make informed decisions about the health and future care of the larger reef. The census is now an annual affair, with the third set to take place in October 2022.
Why it matters: The greater impact of this initiative is its replicability in other vulnerable corners of the planet, where it can be tailored for large-scale conservation studies.
African Leadership University | 🤝
The idea: For the past several years, this university program has helped 500 African students grow their entrepreneurial skills and land jobs across the world.
Details: Established in 2015 by Ghanaian entrepreneur Fred Swaniker to address the dearth of African leaders in industries across the continent, the African Leadership University seeks to train and promote diverse locals. “There has been this thought that if you want real expertise, you have to import it from other countries,” says Richard Vigne, executive director of ALU’s School of Wildlife Conservation, one of the institution’s most in-demand programs. The university has campuses in Rwanda and Mauritius, plus pop-up learning hubs across the continent (the third hub just opened in Kigali, Rwanda, this past July). To date, ALU has placed 85 percent of alumni with jobs within six months of graduation.
Why it matters: Slowly but surely, industries are realizing that gender and racial underrepresentation is an economic pitfall. And although the Eurocentric mindset is deeply embedded in corporations around the world—and particularly in the United States— establishments like ALU are chipping away at the status quo.
Niarra Travel | 🤝 🦏
The idea: London-based tour operator Niarra Travel is hoping to change industry norms by halving the standard 20 percent commission on bookings and investing the other 10 percent in conservation and communities in the destinations it serves.
Details: Byron Thomas started Niarra Travel in 2020 with a new industry standard in mind. The company seeks to make the trip planning process as collaborative as possible while hosting conservation-forward offerings like game drives in Australia’s Arkaba Conservancy and sustainable accommodations in the continents they operate. As much as possible, Niarra funnels tourism dollars from these experiences to the local people and the places they live. So, scout the best of Kenya’s wildlife or venture into the cloud forests of Costa Rica with ease of mind, knowing that your holiday is not only going to be uplifting for you but also for the local economy, animals, and the natural environment as well.
Why it matters: Through establishing this commission model, other tour operators will be encouraged to offer similar programs in order to remain competitive.
Rashad Frazier, co-founder of Camp Yoshi
Alex Forrestier
One of Camp Yoshi’s bookable trips
Alex Forrestier
Camp Yoshi | 👨👨👧👦 🤝
The idea: Camp Yoshi reimagines guided adventure trips for Black travelers and their allies—disrupting the white-dominated group travel space.
Details: Historically, everything from exclusionary marketing to legal restrictions have hindered Black people from experiencing the outdoors, but Portland, Oregon-based startup Camp Yoshi is in the business of closing the so-called “adventure gap” by reimagining how group trips are planned and promoted. The impetus for Camp Yoshi came on a trip to Montana’s Glacier National Park in 2020, when its founders were overwhelmed with messages from family and friends concerned about their outdoor trip. In response, they launched a Black-owned company to serve as an example of how the group travel industry can better serve this often-excluded segment of the market. It has quickly gained traction, leading sold-out trips throughout the American west and beyond.
Why it matters: Camp Yoshi has spearheaded a new inclusionary model to help establish the outdoors as a space for all communities.
Voygr Expeditions | 🌱 👨👨👧👦 🦏
The idea: This expedition company has taken conservation-based tourism to the next level by introducing travelers to the communities and ecosystems of Central Asia.
Details: Since 2012, Voygr has operated guided tours along the ancient Silk Road, the Himalayas, and North India. Travelers with the expedition company won’t sleep in conventional beds or hotels when exploring Central Asia. Instead, simple, traditional yurts and snug sleeping bags will leave the terrain practically untouched, helping travelers to their ultimate reward: unparalleled access to elusive snow leopards (and more). Sustainability and conservation are the two pillars of the company—Voygr calculates the carbon footprint for every itinerary and plants pine trees to help offset the impact. Plus, more than 20 percent of its annual profits go toward the conservation of snow leopards, Siberian tigers, and other endangered species.
Why it matters: Instead of nonlocal middlemen arranging tours and building intrusive hotels, the company engages local communities and truly leaves spaces better than they found them. (Voygr is not just carbon-neutral, but carbon-negative.)
Vast landscapes outside of Salta, Argentina
Maia Bermudez/Unsplash
Fundación Rewilding Argentina | 🌱 👨👨👧👦 🦏
The idea: Argentina’s arresting landscapes are getting an eco-friendly tourism boost with the help of a group of determined environmentalists and a conservation model imported from Africa.
Details: Notorious for the ravages of its beef industry, Argentina has recently undergone the most wide-reaching conservation efforts in the country’s history. Two foundations—Fundación Rewilding Argentina and Fundación Rewilding Chile—are responsible for 15 million protected acres that will be in large part sustained by tourism income, which are being donated in stages to the public as national parks. Meanwhile, the foundations are creating lodges and visitor centers, training rangers and guides, and reintroducing or stabilizing keystone species. Rewilding’s long-term vision is to create a circuit of parks, from the Amazon-like El Impenetrable and Iberá Wetlands in the far north to high-plateau Parque Patagonia in the south.
Why it matters: The Rewilding foundations are writing the textbook on ecological restoration in South America. Thanks to their efforts, Argentina could easily become the world’s next big conservation destination.
Saira Hospitality | 🤝
The idea: This nonprofit is reimagining conventional hotel education and hiring practices, focusing on marginalized workers to make the industry more representative.
Details: Historically, specific kinds of people—usually male, often white—have held the loftier jobs of hospitality. But the events of summer 2020 sped up the travel sector’s reckoning with statistics showing that only 2 percent of hospitality executives come from the Black community and only 22 percent identify as female. Now the industry is taking measures to become more representative. Saira, launched in 2014 by Harsha L’Aqua, focuses on refugees, single mothers, unhoused people, and other marginalized workers, partnering with brands like Nobu and Citizen M to train and employ them. In May, the organization opened its first brick-and-mortar school, in London’s East End, to keep up with the demand for hospitality jobs created by COVID-19.
Why it matters: To date, there are 361 graduates, and 80 percent of students hope to reach managerial positions.
Inclucare | 🤝 ♿
The idea: A new hospitality certification program that audits hospitality brands to ensure people with disabilities are included at every phase of their journey.
Details: Numerous hospitality certification programs tackle elements of accessibility, but Inclucare aims to take a more comprehensive view of inclusion for disabled travelers. In July, Amilla Maldives Resort and Residences became the first property to complete the certification which required the resort to complete the Inclusion in Hospitality Property Audit, facilitated by a remote auditing app that helps verify details of the overall experience and identify necessary adaptations. At launch, the new certification scheme’s key focus is on the overall built environment and guest rooms, but extends to a digital accessibility review of a brand’s website and staff training. Living up to its ambitions will be challenging in ensuring inclusion for a population as diverse as disabled travelers, but it’s a promising first step for the industry that’s already having an impact at Amilla. As a result of the certification, the resort plans to roll out calming spaces designed for neurodivergent travelers, adaptive yoga and snorkeling, and experiences tailored to vision- and hearing-impaired guests.
Why it matters: Inclucare goes beyond a narrow focus on the accessibility of the built environment to ensure the full destination is inclusive to people with both visible and hidden disabilities.