Greater Expectations

IN 2019 I WAS living in a small town in Mexico. It was a beautiful place, a half-moon bay cut from the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains, where the jungle runs right up to the beach. It’s a former fishing village with a clean, consistent, right-hand surf break, which is what made the town boom — or doomed it, depending on your point of view. First the surfers arrived, then the backpackers, and, ultimately, all kinds of tourists. When we moved there, the population was about 2,000. It’s now over 3,000 and swells to more than twice that in the high season. 

One of the friends I made, a woman my age who was born there, told me how, within our lifetime, the area had transformed. There were numerous streets that hadn’t existed when she was a child now paved and lined with restaurants, stores, and bars. The less positive consequences of the rapid growth were largely invisible to tourists, but for anyone living there they were impossible to ignore. The water would run out; the sewage treatment plant couldn’t handle the population during the high season so its runoff polluted the ocean; the overtaxed power grid, already wonky, would go out during storms and not come back for a few days; and of course there were issues with trash, especially plastic, which washed down the river into the sea and, ultimately, onto the beaches. 

In the two years I lived there, I watched from my office window as half a block of buildings was ripped down and replaced with a hulking hotel, and I saw the verdant jungle around my house clear-cut, with buildings popping up seemingly overnight, anchored into the soft dirt cliffs with questionable foundations. The changes happened so quickly that the town I had first visited 10 years earlier (before I moved there, thus further contributing to its problems) is different in many ways from the one that’s there now. 

With the negative impacts so blatant, it would be easy to write off tourism as problematic there. But. 

When the pandemic hit, a local vigilante group made up of surfers, waiters, and other young guys from the community blocked the town’s two entrances. Their checkpoints kept tourists out, and, with them, Covid. The streets were silent, a ghost town. The beaches were empty, and, at night, as my girls ran along the shore, the waves skirting their ankles, the pelicans overhead dive-bombing the surf to fish, we were the only people in sight. Friends who had lived there for years sighed as they told me: This is what it used to be like.

But the town was built on tourism. It was a single, cash economy. With no visitors there was no work, and that was an impossible equation for many of our neighbors. One night, just a few weeks into the lockdown, we ran into one of my husband’s friends in the street, a local who made his living renting golf carts to tourists. As we stood six feet apart, he told us he had fainted the day before. When we asked if he had eaten, he shrugged, discomforted, his eyes cutting towards his young son sitting in the cart next to him. The beaches may have been clean, the pelicans thriving, but without any tourists our friend had had to choose between feeding himself or his child. 

Tourism was the reason our friend was able to live here. Those hotels, restaurants, and stores had made it financially viable for him — a working-class Mexican who spoke beautiful English — to build a life near the place he came from. There was no other industry, so without tourism he would have had to move elsewhere, to a place where he could support his family. Tourism, too, had brought a turtle rescue to the area, whose volunteers walked the beaches identifying new nests, carefully digging up their eggs, keeping them safe until they could hatch, and releasing the baby turtles at a time that gave them the best chance of survival. It had produced a jaguar conservancy, which had placed trail cameras throughout the jungle to monitor the endangered native cats. It had attracted a Swiss woman who for years had run weekly canine spay-and-neuter clinics, reducing the town’s feral dog population, resulting in  safer streets, especially on the edges of town, where locals lived. It had produced an international school where half of the students were from the local community, attending on scholarship and benefiting from a bilingual education that gave them a crucial skill (English) to participate in the area’s primary industry. 

The question of whether tourism had been good or bad for the town was not black and white. It was so much more complicated and nuanced. Like one of those drawings that turns from a face to a vase, it all depended on your perspective. 

Several months after that exchange with my husband’s friend, I returned to New York. Not long afterwards, I was hired to lead the relaunch of Departures, a luxury travel magazine. It was my entrée into the travel industry, where I was about to get intimately acquainted with one of its favorite buzzwords: sustainability. 

The Oxford English Dictionary defines sustainability as “avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance,” but I prefer the United Nations Brundtland Commission’s definition of “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” However you define it, a dictionary definition of sustainability belies the word’s massive import today. Is there anything, any industry, that does not want to be seen as sustainable? The word is slapped onto clothing, sofas, shampoo, cars, breakfast cereals, wine, sharing apps. But I’m not sure there is anywhere I have seen it pop up quite as regularly as in the travel industry. 

Sustainability is a pillar of just about every travel company. From the tiniest family-owned properties to mega hotel groups, from single destination tour operators to cruise ships and private jets, each has a sustainability policy. However, it wasn’t until I gained my footing in the industry that I began to identify just how diversely this word was being used. 

A big part of the travel industry is conferences, where editors and travel agents go to discover and meet operators. One can walk through these convention centers, where every major tourism brand in the world is represented, and ask about the vendor’s approach to sustainability. Each company will have a prepared “sustainability” response (as they should), but their variety is remarkable. You will hear stories, delivered in tones ranging from bored robot to evangelical, about everything from eliminating plastic drinking straws to fully-fledged NGOs that have rewilded and preserved millions of hectares of native landscape.

In the industry, this is called the “sustainability journey.” Where a company is on that journey, I have been told by experts, is less important than getting them to embark on it. It’s a wholesome idea, put forth by true believers, and I like the positivity that undergirds it: It is built on a belief in the power of collective action. However, as an editor, I am inherently a bit skeptical. It’s my job to be, to try to translate all that noise into actionable information for readers, as they consider this loaded word and concept and try to make informed choices. 

Truthfully, there is no simple answer that allows you to say: This is what we mean when we say “sustainability.” Sustainability can be used to talk about how water is managed, or how much trash is made and how it is handled, or how electricity is generated. It can refer to food waste, preservation of wildlife habitat, or creating jobs for locals that allow them to live in the places they come from. It can speak to the development of innovative fuels that release fewer emissions or to hiring practices that prioritize locals. It can mean efforts to attract tourists to a place so local culture is preserved — or to keep them away so local culture is preserved. It is an exceptionally complicated topic, not least because so many of these priorities, all admirable, are often in direct competition. 

Over the past four years, as I have begun to understand what a twisty knot sustainability is, I have also come to believe this knot is one of the most interesting things about the travel industry. It is complicated, virtually unsolvable (my favorite kind of puzzle to mull over), and creates enormous possibilities. Travel operators have an inextricable impetus and opportunity to preserve land, habitats, resources, communities, and culture because their businesses rely on these things. They are the product. And travelers have the ability to participate in and drive positive impact by making thoughtful choices about where and how they travel. In today’s crazy world, it is the rare story with endless feel-good potential. 

Last year, I had the opportunity to visit Rwanda. Let me first say, if you are interested in traveling in Africa — and you really should be — and Rwanda isn’t on your list, it really should be. I’m not sure when I have visited anywhere that has so entirely surpassed and upended my expectations.

 I was a teenager in 1994 when the country was ravaged by civil war and genocide, which, I’m sad to say, was the event I still associated with Rwanda. In the 30 years since the tragedy, the country has made an impressive recovery. Conservation has been an essential pillar of that evolution, with a deliberate focus on developing a sustainable travel and tourism industry. Plastic bags have been banned in the country for nearly 20 years. Its roads and hillsides are spotless, which, along with keeping  plastic from leaching into the soil and waterways, is beautiful — and eye-opening: It makes you realize how much plastic we have become accustomed to seeing. Travel and tourism now represent 10% of the country’s GDP, revenue that has been reinvested in national development programs including road works, free primary education, and universal healthcare, creating tangible value for locals linked to tourism and conservation.

I was in Rwanda to trek to visit the mountain gorillas, which live in only one place in the world, the cloudy, jungle-covered Virunga Mountains, which straddle the borders of Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. These gorillas have been a key aspect of Rwanda’s sustainable tourism development and, like the country, they are a success story. 

Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa. Parts of it, near the gorilla habitat, average 1,000 people per square kilometer (for comparison, the city of London averages 5,000). The apes live in a network of protected national parks, but the parks are small and bound by this densely inhabited farmland on which subsistence farmers eke out a living averaging less than $2 a day. When competition for limited resources is so fierce, and the gorillas’ ecosystem is so small, they are vulnerable to habitat encroachment and poaching. It’s a delicate balance to try to bring even more people into an area like this. But without tourism, the animals’ chances of survival are unlikely, because they don’t have an economic value. Still, if you don’t develop that tourism model sensitively, they won’t survive either.  

So gorilla tourism has been built with a focus on high-end ecotourism rather than volume. Rwanda issues only 100 permits a day, currently priced at $1,500 for foreign visitors (the price for Rwandans and other East African nationals is $200, still incredibly expensive by local standards). Portions of this revenue are shared directly with local communities, and job opportunities are created for those who live near the parks. This considered combination has proven highly successful. When Dian Fossey first began surveying the gorillas in the Virungas in 1967, it was estimated that there were less than 250 of these great apes left in the world. In 2019, that population passed 1,000.

I visited the area with Volcanoes Safaris, the region’s oldest operator. Praveen Moman, its founder, was born in Uganda to an Indian family that was later exiled in the post-colonial 1970s. In 1997, Moman returned to build a company he hoped would pioneer tourism in the area and support conservation. His philosophy has been that providing opportunities for the people who live in the local communities is not a secondary goal to conservation but wholly interwoven with the objective of protecting the habitat and wildlife. If the people who live in the surrounding areas are able to earn a sustained living from tourism, they can become stewards of the environment, protecting rather than degrading it. Volcanoes Safari now operates five lodges in Uganda and Rwanda, with a focus on great apes tourism. 

When I spoke to Moman for this piece, I apologetically asked what I knew was a pretty cynical American question: Is this conservation work an ethical imperative, a business imperative, or both? Laughing, he replied, “For me, it’s an imperative because I have been connected to this area through my family since 1905. It’s this long-term connection to the area that is inspirational. I was privileged enough to see it as a child, and because I saw it 50 years ago, I would like to do my best to ensure that in 50 years, it's still there and thriving. I don't think I will be on the planet in 50 years, but I hope that these areas and the value for the local people will continue … I think that each of us who are purveyors of tourism have to ask the question: What are we doing to protect species, protect land, protect habitats, and support local people?”

The reality is, it’s both. It is an ethical imperative for humans to do what we can to mitigate, in whatever ways we can, our impact on the world. But it is a business imperative to protect your company’s assets, which, in the case of travel, are the environment and communities in which you operate. I heard this again and again as I spoke to industry leaders about their company’s sustainability efforts, and belief in what a company is doing comes from the top down. Leaders who believe in creating positive impact through their companies create companies that do incredible work to create positive impact. 

I also spoke with Leo Ghitis, the founder of Nayara Resorts, a collection of six luxury resorts in Central and South America. Ghitis, whose background is in real estate, founded the company a decade ago. A native of Columbia who had spent most of his adult life in Miami, he first visited Costa Rica as a traveler and was moved by its conservation rehabilitation story. “In 1940,” he told me, “75% of Costa Rica was a primary rainforest. Forty years later, only 25% of those forests remained. That's the fastest deforestation ever, by any country. When the people in Costa Rica realized what was happening, they came together. And they went from being one of the worst deforestation stories in the world to becoming, probably, the most successful reforestation project of any country in the world. The numbers change, but last I heard: 60 to 70% of all land in Costa Rica is protected national parks. I decided that I wanted to be part of this incredible success story.”

 In the years since, his company has worked extensively not just to preserve land, but also to be part of the great rewilding. His Nayara Springs hotel is now part of Relais & Châteaux — a global not-for-profit hotel and restaurant association with its own documented, annually reported commitment to sustainability — and Ghitis sits on its sustainability committee. Nayara Tented Camp in Costa Rica sits atop a mountain from which the jungle had been clear-cut. After several years, the jungle has been reseeded, and while it’s not mature, it is on its way. The wildlife, from monkeys to butterflies to birds, has returned — faster, Ghitis says, than he could have imagined. 

Of course it’s amazing to have founders and industry leaders who care about the ethics of the businesses they operate. But not all leaders share that motivation and not all businesses make environmental impact a priority. One of the ways to make such leaders care is to make it financially viable to do so — or financially unviable not to. This is where travelers can have a positive impact: through the choices they make. 

As I researched this piece and spoke with a number of industry leaders about sustainability, I began to believe that the word, and maybe the idea, has become a bit dated. “I came to the conclusion a number of years ago,” Ghitis told me, “that sustainability is not enough. We need to move on to a model of regenerative travel. Sustainability deals mostly with making sure that we do not do any damage to the environment. I believe very deeply that keeping things on the status quo is not enough. We need to restore nature to its previous glory, not just leave it where it is, but make it better for future generations.” 

I heard a similar sentiment from Liesel van Zyl, the Head of Impact at Go2Africa. “Sustainable travel, for me,” she told me, “is about offering customers the choice to have a travel experience that not only ensures responsible use of local resources with low environmental impact but also — and this is the exciting part — starts to use regenerative practices and actually has a positive impact on the surrounding communities and environment.”

Go2Africa is a 25-year-old tour operator that creates custom safari itineraries in partnership with over 1,000 independent operators across the entire continent. Part of van Zyl’s remit is to evaluate sustainability practices across those partners, which, as one can imagine, vary greatly. Through her research she has noted disparities in resources can allow a large operator with multiple properties and a large staff to find time to think through and respond to her assessment questionnaires in ways small operators sometimes can’t. A company so small that they can’t answer an assessment is likely going to have a hard time codifying their sustainability efforts. But, van Zyl also clarifies, that doesn’t mean large operators are necessarily doing a better job. Once they do respond, smaller operators can often identify numerous existing efforts, from funding schools to supporting community projects. They just don’t have the same resources to tell those stories. 

The thoughts about sustainability and travel I will leave you with are pragmatic ones, from people who know much more about this subject than I do. I asked the experts I spoke with for their advice to the average traveler who cares enough to think about how their actions affect the places they go to and the people who live there. While a single definition of sustainable travel may be impossible, we can at least use some practical advice on how to consider which choices will have a more positive (or less negative) impact.  

Vince Shacks, Group Impact Manager, Wilderness Safari
Wilderness Safari is a 40-year-old African conservation and hospitality company with a mission to preserve wilderness and wildlife through high-end tourism. I have heard it referred to within the industry as essentially a conservation company that generates funding for those efforts through luxury travel, although, Shacks assured me, it is also very much a business, and a successful one. Wilderness Safaris is also the company I reference above that has preserved millions of hectares of habitat through its NGO.

“There are some key questions a traveler can ask. In researching the area you're going to, try to get an idea of what the major problems are in that country or region, then simply ask yourself: Is the operator you're traveling with trying to do something for that problem? 

The second question is: Is it clear what they're doing? Are they showing you evidence of what they're trying to do for that problem? It's a very simple metric to say: Look, I understand that in this part of this country, there is a big issue with fresh water. I would like to know that this operator I'm traveling with is doing something to deal with this issue of fresh water provision, or whatever the case may be. 

If you want to dig a bit deeper, there are three things you can check. The first thing is whether the top level of leadership in a business is driving an impact agenda. Is there someone sitting on the executive committee who has a portfolio that involves sustainability or impact so it is brought up continuously at board level? The second thing is: Have you got a plan for how you implement this strategy? Can I see the plan? And the third thing is: Are you reporting your results?

If you have those things, you're dealing with an operator that is worth supporting. 

Liesel van Zyl, Head of Impact, Go2Africa
I don't think guests need to do all the research themselves. It's a lot, and it's quite niche. But equip yourself with some key questions. One of the questions I find to be really helpful is: How does my stay benefit the local environment and communities? You may know nothing about visiting Mexico, or New York, or Africa, but once you've asked a few properties or a few travel companies that question, you'll very easily then be able to make a considered choice. 

Wes Espinosa, Executive Director, The Center for Responsible Travel (CREST)

CREST is a globally recognized nonprofit dedicated to transforming the way the world travels. 

Traveler education is very important — and ensuring that travelers understand that they do have to do research, that it's okay to go to a community that isn't well marketed, and that it's okay to stay in a different hotel, not just a Condé Nast “best hotel.” One thing that I always recommend is to find a local guide. Sometimes that means not just going through a hotel or operator — which is also fine — but also looking up the local guide association of a place, or even considering contracting a guide independently. I know that's some work, but having a local guide changes everything. Even if you don't use them for your whole trip, if you can get some input from them for a day or two it can totally change the structure of your trip. That's where travelers really have to have to think a little outside of the box.

I'm not a proponent of saying “no” to going somewhere. It’s not necessarily equitable to take away money from anybody; there are so many places suffering from over-tourism, you can't avoid it. Over-tourism is one of the threat areas that we work in and it’s such a complicated phenomenon. The challenge with over-tourism is that it's often not addressed until it's a thing and then going backwards is extremely complicated. So I like to say: Don't necessarily avoid those places, but also pair it with a trip for a few nights to another community. Maybe if you're going to visit Barcelona, look at visiting during a lower season or look at other places you can go near there. The individual traveler can do what they can to go to a place not affected by over-tourism and certainly look out for authentic experiences in smaller communities.