Sustainable Travel Made Simple

An emerging travel “trend” makes me nervous

I like to think that I’m the kind of guy who knows what’s trendy before the world turns and embraces a new idea, with travel, obviously, but with everything else as well. If we at Global Basecamps can’t either enthusiastically or derisively comment on a suggestion being made about a new style of travel or an emerging destination than it makes trip design just a little less fun. With that said I somehow totally missed the boat on what is being heralded as not just a “growing” trend but also what is being called by Ecotravel News as “the ultimate in ecotravel.” Is it kayaking on the Black Sea? Walking around the world? Working with local communities in Columbia? No, no and no. It’s not leaving home. It’s the staycation.

Here is the definition of the staycation:

A staycation (or stay-cation, or stacation) is a period of time in which an individual or family stays at home and relaxes at home or takes day trips from their home to area attractions. Staycations have achieved high popularity in current hard economic times in which unemployment levels and gas prices are high.

Common activities of a staycation include use of the backyard pool, visits to local parks and museums, and attendance at local festivals.

I’m shocked and amazed that I somehow missed this emerging travel trend for so long that by the time I heard about it had a definition in Wikipedia and it was being written up by such media titans as the Wall Street Journal and the Wichita Eagle. Didn’t this used to be called taking a day off of work? The only good thing about finding out about this so late in the game is that everyone at Global Basecamps, and most of the people we know, have been going on staycations for decades. In fact, I was on staycation for 2 years in my early twenties! I have some friends who went on staycation after college and they’re still on staycation! Maybe we didn’t know what it was called but we embraced the trend long before everyone else started doing it so our reputation stands untarnished.

Here’s a thought: if you want to stay home and not do anything for a couple of days or a week or a month than more power to you but it’s not a vacation. Taking the kids to Great Adventure is not ecotravel. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather be on Lightning Loops right now than going into the office but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Want to save some of your hard-earned dollars and still go out and see something new? Go to the Third World and live on twenty dollars a day and take local transportation everywhere. As a special added bonus if you hang out with the locals you’ll get to meet some true masters of the staycation, people who have literally been on staycation their entire lives!

If you’d rather actually travel but still need to keep to a budget than I have a surprise for you. Shhh, it’s not quite ready yet but I’ll tell you a secret: there’s a new site acommin’ that will allow you to have your cake and eat it too:

www.perfectguesthouse.com

It’s where hotel style meets affordability and should make these downtimes a little more palatable. Oh, and most of them are truly sustainable and the rest are trying.

Or you could just put a tent up in your living room and unplug the phone.

Where you travel and how you spend can change the world

In the spirit of July and because I was exercising my freedom to not write a blog last week I’m going to talk a little bit about Independence and how freedom of choice can affect destinations, communities, regions, industries and the planet.  It’s pretty obvious that there is no greater power on the planet than the power of currency.   My favorite aspect of the Green Revolution that’s taking place is how simple it is to actually foster change through spending.  There are those that will tell you that the only way to save the planet is by changing the consumer mentality and to reduce our possessions and fundamentally end our “throw-away” culture.  I’m not the person you want to have this discussion with at a dinner party because I seriously love buying things and am only limited in scope by my bank account.  I agree in theory, but changing the cultural makeup of billions of people is a lot harder than buying smart.  As Josh Dorfman has so perfectly pointed out in The Lazy Environmentalist, “the easiest way to exercise the power to influence society is by purchasing sustainable products”.  The range of product categories and options is becoming limitless and this is exactly as it should be.  The more that we as a society spend on green products the more green products will become available.  It’s that simple.  Travel is no exception.

I was recently contacted by a friend that I haven’t spoken to since High School.  She is now a cop and a single Mother of three boys.  She had read some of my previous blogs and very rightly pointed out that not everyone has the ability, either financially or in terms of time, to explore the world and take deep breaths and interact with local communities and be the person that I keep on talking about.  When she gets the rare chance to get away from all of her responsibilities she wants to go to a nice hotel with a pool and some sun and a bar and belly-up and enjoy herself for a week.  She, in theory, isn’t interested in getting to know the local community and wants to just get away.  Oh, and she wants it to be inexpensive so why not go on a totally unsustainable package that includes airfare and hotel and just not worry about it.  She’s absolutely right.  Why not?  Why should she be limited in her choices by my near insistence that you’ve got to get out there and hold hands with everyone and tread lightly?  She shouldn’t.

We always stress the difference between being a tourist and being a traveler.  Is there a similar distinction between going on vacation and having a meaningful and responsible interaction with a foreign destination?  I say no.  Sustainable travel can and should be everything from a trip around the block to a six thousand mile journey.  I love exploring the most off-the-grid places I can find but don’t think for a second that I don’t equally love sitting at an ocean-side bar watching the sun set.  Package beach holidays are extremely popular because they are easy and cheap and get you away from it all.  Large hotel chains are taking baby steps to be sustainable by putting pretty little placards with a leaf on them in the bathroom asking if you need your towels washed every day.  That’s fine and we support them for beginning to move in the right direction.  Just for the record, about six miles away there is a locally-owned small beachfront hotel that treads lightly and has one of the best bars on the island.  Seriously.  Oh, and it’s only about $30 more per night than what you spent to stay at the five hundred room mega-resort.  I’m not being cool-guy traveler…there is nothing wrong with staying where you want and having the vacation that makes the most sense to you.  It is your fundamental right and we won’t look down our noses at you. I would only ask that you look at your options and then decide; I seriously think you’ll have a much better time somewhere else.  The money that you are spending at the resort is leaving the island as quickly as it is coming in.  Alternatively the money that you are not spending at the resort by choosing to stay somewhere green can force them to change their whole plan and identity.  Think I’m exaggerating?  Three of the four largest hotel chains on the planet have put huge-scale sustainability plans into place in the last three years.  Is it because they are good stewards?  No, it’s because they don’t want you to spend your hard-earned dollars anywhere else.  You have the freedom to spend your money where you want to.  Spend it so that it positively changing the world and everyone benefits…even if it’s just on umbrella drinks.

No matter where you choose to stay you are interacting with your local community.  If you would rather be another sunburned tourist at a crowded pool bar paying for overpriced umbrella drinks rather than being another sunburned tourist chatting with the Rastas at the beachside bar just around the bend than I salute you.  Me?  I’m gonna overpay down the beach with the locals.  The small hotels and guesthouses are everywhere, you just have to look for them.  Where can you find them?  I think you know the answer to that one (hint: it starts with a www.globalbasecamps…).  Give us a beach and we’ll show you some amazing locals who would love to show you their island.

In closing, it’s also imperative to remember that the freedoms that we have: to travel, to make purchasing decisions, to get away from our lives and responsibilities for a day or a week, are not freedoms shared by everyone.  Getting to know local communities has a really important flipside: letting them get to know you.  No matter how green you are or sustainable your trip is you still have advantages that most people in the world can only dream about…like going somewhere far away just to drink on the beach.  Sharing a rum punch with a local will also let him know that you’re just another person on the planet doing what you do and trying to make sense of it all by hitting up the bar.

Welcome home to Aaron and Liz, two of our favorite people, who after seven months in South America are trying to make sense of it all and are exercising their freedom to not pick a favorite destination from their trip. We know a good bar in San Diego if you want to talk about it…

Keep it simple to really travel sustainably

There’s no question that the incredible amount of press that going green has gotten lately is a good thing, an eye-opener for the masses and a call to arms. The only real negative that I can see is that the massive amount of information being thrown around (much of it just plain wrong) is so overwhelming that it’s started creating confusion in some and absolute shut-me-down panic in others. Everyone needs to take a deep breath and relax for a second. Yes, suddenly realizing after 200 years that there are other ways of living can be quite an eye-opener. Waking up and having to take responsibility for your actions after a lifetime of care-free existence can take some getting used to but let’s keep things in perspective and embrace the incredible new options that we have available to us. Listen to me: It’s not your fault. Seriously. It’s not your fault. You are not killing the polar bears. You are not going to flood the coastal cities. You are not to blame. Now you know and can make things better and lessen your impact. We all have the ability to live lightly so I’ll let far more experienced people tell you how to go about your daily life in a more sustainable way and I’ll focus on what I know.

As I’ve said before one of the major problems with sustainable travel is that there is no universally accepted definition of what sustainable travel really is. I’ll spend some serious time in the coming months discussing the different facets of sustainability in the travel industry so instead of giving you another checklist of all the things you’re doing wrong I’ll give you a suggestion that will have you traveling clean and green in no time. There is only one step to getting the GBC Sustainable Travel certificate:

Focus on connecting with your destination

That’s it. We can get into offsetting your carbon footprint and other more advanced concepts later. The best way to travel responsibly is to stay in locally owned hotels, eat local food, interact with the local environment and keep it simple. The initial advantage to eco-lodges was that their construction and existence didn’t interfere with the wildlife in an area. Think about yourself in the same terms…make yourself a transient part of the local environment and it will be very hard to tread destructively. This may be simple but it works. Far too many people go to a destination and stay either within the gates of their hotel or venture no further than the tourism-based bars, restaurants and shops on the main strip. Spend some time before your trip learning a little bit of the local language, the history of the destination and something about the environment. Then get out there and see all you can see, meet locals on the bus and at the bar and support businesses that take pride in their community and want to share it with you.

The best and easiest way to make a real connection with a place is to stay in a hotel or lodge that is truly vested in the location, not just the people that are visiting. This is as true in New York City as it is in Patagonia. Luckily it seems that most properties that take their sustainability very seriously also work closely with the local community. This is win-win for everyone involved because not only are the employees of the hotel a perfect resource but they also can point you in the right direction for all of your explorations. Eat Cioppino in San Francisco, steak in Argentina and oranges in Valencia. Make the connection your number one priority and you’ll really begin to understand what makes the people and the place tick. OK, you get it but how do you actually find the right places to stay? That’s the easiest part of all: go to globalbasecamps.com and take your pick, we’ve already done the work for you.

Sustainable hotels grow up and get pricey

The first “eco lodge” I stayed in was in Northern Thailand in the early 90’s. It was essentially camping in a rundown thatch hut just down the street from the Bob Marley café and the endless loop of Legend playing all day and night did nothing to add to the authentic wilderness experience I was looking for. I’ll hand it to the good people of “Sunny Day Eco-Lodge,” they ran a truly sustainable operation. Energy consumption was zero. Water consumption was zero. The incredible variety of arachnid wildlife in my room was thriving and the community directly benefitted from the $2 I spent on Banana pancakes. It was a hysterical experience and one that would have put most people off of anything green or sustainable or eco forever. The problem with eco travel in general has always been the perception that in order to be sustainable basic comforts have to be given up, and this was often true. I could have stayed down the street from Sunny Day and had running water and a door to my room but I wanted to be eco. Those days are long gone.

The new crop of sustainable lodges are as luxury as they come with hundred bottle wine lists and million dollar views. Unfortunately they also tend to have price tags to match, many with nightly prices well over $1000 per person per night. The trend started with luxury safari lodges in Africa and has spread to Australia, the US and South America. The lodges are built from local materials (by award-winning architects), employ local people (well versed in attending to wealthy guests), conserve water and electricity (through elaborate and expensive in-house systems) and serve locally grown organic food (prepared by internationally recognized chefs). So is this a problem? Does this mean that there is no sustainable middle-ground between a ramshackle jungle hut and a posh mountaintop retreat? All the major studies show that most travelers are willing to pay a premium to travel sustainably but a $500 per night premium? Somehow I doubt it.

The bottom line is that we all wish that we could spend the money to stay at the ultra-lux eco-lodges and as long as they’re truly benefitting local communities and economies there is nothing wrong with charging high prices. The days of the $200 luxury hotel are starting to be a thing of the past and there’s no question that it’s truly expensive to build a sustainable hotel or retrofit an existing one. The more support that we can give properties that have committed to sustainability, even in small ways, the more that mid-range hotels and lodges will go green. For now, in some parts of the world, only the rich will get to experience what true sustainable luxury means but we’ll have a lot more options in the coming years as properties of all sizes and prices come to realize that sustainable business is good business. As always, we’re keeping our eyes peeled for hotels, lodges and excursions that combine sustainability and style in all price ranges so check back often as the green trend becomes a true revolution.

Rampant Greenwashing forces us to keep it real

Lately Green has become the envy of all of the other colors as its meteoric rise in popularity has left even perennial favorite black in the dust. Green is the color of jealousy, inexperience and gills after a night of drinking. To Americans green is of course the color of money and has also become the trendiest color in Hollywood as everyone from George Clooney to Scarlet Johansson publicly endorse sustainability. It’s the combination of earning potential and hype that is starting to cause some serious concern as companies scramble to publicly announce their Green credentials. So called Greenwashing is nothing new…oil companies have used photos of beautiful landscapes to sell gasoline for decades but never have so many companies in so many different fields announced their sustainability in such an arbitrary way.

With no governing Green body politic for most industries can anyone just decide to be green? What does it entail? What kind of changes need to be implemented in order for a company to really be sustainable? My mother worries that the trend will end as people get sick of hearing about it and I agree, when Paris Hilton announces publicly that she is starting a new line of green heiress cosmetics will we all run to our local Hummer dealer to separate ourselves from the hype?

Not only is the travel industry no exception but it is perhaps the worst offender. When we started putting all of our properties together for Global Basecamps we really wanted to avoid calling ourselves an eco travel company in order to avoid having to explain ourselves or our definition of sustainable. Having worked on several conservation projects over the years and having seen both successful eco-lodges and ridiculous greenwashing it didn’t make sense to me to get into a debate about what constituted a sustainable property. My rationale was that we would simply work with companies that were responsible citizens of the planet, highlight eco-minded properties wherever possible and keep a product line that also included non-sustainable hotels if they were unique enough. We’ve changed our minds and the reason why is very simple. With no universally accepted criteria for sustainability tour operators, hotels and entire consortiums have started making and more importantly marketing claims that have inspired us to do it for real and to do it right. Global Basecamps is going 100% sustainable and we want you to come along for the ride. We’re going to make it very clear what our criteria is and what we expect from the products and services we sell and we’re going to cull the properties that fit the bill, which we estimate at about a third of our hotels. It’ll be more than a little bit painful at times (ciao beautiful design hotel in Venice) but we think it’s best for our clients, the industry and the planet. We want to give credit where credit is due and force change by funneling dollars to those who really deserve it. We’ll keep you informed on the process and I hope that it’s as painless as it is necessary. Yes, Green is the new black and no doubt extremely trendy but it doesn’t have to be painful, unlike the parachute pants and fat laces we wore in High School.

The Evolution of Independent Travel and that thing about the really long Journey

a new site, a new era and a suddenly trendy old philosophy

It has been said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This is painfully obvious to anyone that has attempted even a small fraction of that distance but the point is that it’s a fitting metaphor for any large-scale endeavor. We have embarked on our own symbolic journey by launching Global Basecamps, a new travel site meant to inspire and empower, educate and enthrall and of course make us famous eco-champions who travel to the farthest corners of the globe and get paid for it. We’ve asked ourselves almost continually during our years of development why we didn’t start small, why we couldn’t just pick one small region and focus on building the business step by step. No, that would be far too easy. We’ve set out to build the first travel site dedicated to the intersection of sustainable and trendy; that brand new place where the online booking capabilities of monstrosities like Expedia and Orbitz meet the design aesthetics of cutting edge architecture with a philosophy that would make Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio clasp hands and dance a jig. Oh, and we want to do it on a truly global scale. Sustainable Travel is finally growing up and our goal is to not only make researching and booking the world’s best Green hotels, lodges and tours easy and fun but to whisper sweet nothings into the ear of the global travel industry and support the continued growth, step by step, of what is quickly changing the way the world travels. And we want to look good while we do it.

Our philosophy is pretty simple: travel is the most fun and life-changing thing you can do and when done correctly travel is good for all parties involved. When we first put on our overloaded backpacks years and years ago we quickly joined the masses of the converted with wild looks in our eyes and endless statements about being “travelers not tourists” while casually dropping names like Koh Phangan and Goa and Bariloche into conversations that had nothing to do with travel or geography. Eventually we got tired of communal bathrooms and having our Tevas stolen and realized that the winner isn’t necessarily the person who spent the least on accommodations. This fateful realization opened up an entire world of possibility by introducing us to beautiful lodges and unique guesthouses and the comforts of a wine list after a day of adventuring. Did we sell out? Did we yuppify the entire experience by wrapping it in brand new Patagonia fleece and not fighting over the price of transportation to the border? No. We evolved and figured out that it was possible to have our cake and eat it too, to wander and see and smell and eat and dance while supporting sustainable travel initiatives and being able to keep jobs and relationships for more than three months. To explore in a more focused way while making decisions that supported local communities and environments. We slowly started to figure out how to maximize experience while minimizing impact and realized that we could show other people how to do it too. We called it basecamping, using lodges and small hotels as ground zero for exploring an area, and once we had collected enough of these properties Global Basecamps was born. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not all about luxury and we don’t look down our noses at backpackers. We still have a thousand yard stare when discussing travel and drop names like Kalimantan and Cinqua Terra into unrelated conversations on a regular basis. We still sleep on the beach and ride the bus and embrace everyone who travels for six months on a thin wallet.