Travel + Leisure is now accepting applications for our annual Global Vision Awards. Do you know of a travel company or organization that's changing the world for the better—preserving cultural heritage, saving environments, or giving back to the communities we travel through? Please drop us an email at tlglobalvision@aexp.com or encourage a representative to fill out this year's application, available here (travel companies) and here (other organizations), and return it to us by April 6, 2012.
The before/after photographs are harrowing: in the first, a
postcard-perfect Italian village, with pine-green shutters and lemon and rose
façades, lapped by the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean. In the next, the
same village buried in a horrifying avalanche of mud, its harbor now the color
and consistency of cement.
On October 25, flooding from a freak rainstorm devastated
the town of Vernazza, one of the five villages that make up the celebrated
Cinque Terre in Liguria . Rivers of water and mud cascaded down the steep and
narrow streets, burying the town’s lowest levels in as much as 13 feet of
debris, while also overwhelming the railroad tracks that provided the primary
way in or out of Vernazza. (Part of the Cinque Terre’s allure is that four of
its cliff-hugging villages are accessible only by train, boat, or hiking
trail.)
In our November issue, which just hit newsstands, you’ll find our seventh annual Global Vision Awards, which recognize the new leaders in responsible travel. This year, our winners included everything from Misool Eco Resort, a visionary property that’s responsible for setting up the first shark and ray sanctuary in Indonesia, to Rancho La Puerta, a luxury spa in Baja, Mexico that’s championing ecological restoration and education in the local community. In their own unique ways, these progressive thinkers represent the travel community’s best, most innovative solutions to some of the world’s most vexing problems: climate change, environmental degradation, cultural erosion, and economic inequality.
Last Friday, we invited our jurors and winners to New York City for our first-ever Global Vision Awards luncheon and round-table discussion, which took place at The Lambs Club in midtown’s Chatwal Hotel. Read on to see how the conversation unfolded.
For
years, Myanmar—better known by its colonial name, Burma—has been high on my
list of places I wanted to visit. But the tourism boycott called by Nobel Peace
Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and the country’s unstable politics held me
back. The military junta’s brutal crackdown on monk-led protests in 2007 also
left a bad taste for many a conscientious traveler.
Recently,
though, the country has opened up a bit following elections last year—which
admittedly were engineered in favor of the military-backed party—and Suu Kyi’s
release from house arrest. (Suu Kyi also reversed her stance on tourism two
years ago.) The chance to go to Yangon—or, Rangoon—cropped up recently, and I
leapt at it.
Do you know a travel company that's changing the world? We want to hear about it.
Travel + Leisure's annual Global Vision Awards recognize the outstanding efforts of individuals and organizations that are working to preserve the world's natural and man-made treasures.
Last year’s winners included everything from the enormous CityCenter complex in Las Vegas, a pioneer in green-building techniques, to Kenya’s Micato Safaris, which is helping to fund the education of thousands of children in Nairobi.
If you know of an organization that we should consider for the 2011 awards, please drop us an email at tlglobalvision@aexp.com or encourage it to fill out this year's application, available here (Travel) and here (Non-Travel).
The winners will appear in our November issue.
Amy Farley is the news editor at Travel + Leisure.
