18 January 2008

The Future of Travel

Students from Dartmouth College tour the United States in a bus modified to run on vegetable oil. (Photo Courtesy of the Big Green Bus)

By Martin Manning

Today, the world is entering a new golden age for travel and tourism. Along with the rise in the number of travelers, new technology such as the Internet and mobile communication devices allows for enhanced access to information, greater mobility, and shared cultural experiences on a scale never seen before. These innovations are the closing side of the arc that started centuries ago when explorers encountered dangerous seas to find new worlds and left only diaries behind, often discovered years later. It has been quite a journey!

No Suitcase, No Problem

In today’s linked in world, some travelers have no need for money, airplane tickets, suitcases, or even knowledge of another language. All it takes is choosing a virtual persona, downloading a free program, and making a few clicks of a computer mouse to access the San Francisco-based Second Life — a three-dimensional world travel program available on the Internet.

Virtual tourism in Second Life can take two forms: using a virtual world as a way of enhancing real-world tourism, or touring inside the virtual world to see locations that only exist virtually and are someone’s invention. In the virtual world, people can move around without ever leaving their PCs.

Second Life — which is the brainchild of Linden Lab — provides an opportunity for those who can’t travel to experience what other places might be like. According to Catherine Smith, Linden Lab’s director of marketing, Second Life averages between 40,000 and 50,000 visitors at any given point in a day from all over the world, so it’s a good way to explore new places and to learn about a lot of different cultures.

The places you can visit include history museums, fantasy castles, Mayan ruins, and jungles. The only restriction is the limit of your imagination. And for virtual travel, no passport is required and there is a free translation program called Babbler that does real-time translation in several languages, including Japanese, Chinese, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, and Spanish.

Airline Innovations

Airline carriers worldwide have in recent years faced increased fuel costs, regulatory and security issues, major changes in the competitive landscape, and shifts in consumer travel behavior. Security technology is now part of the flying experience, while low-cost carriers have altered the economics of flying in Europe. Now the biggest challenge for airlines worldwide will be whether they can continue to change with the times.

One innovative program developed by airline carriers would replace paper tickets with information sent to your cell phone. The International Air Transport Association recently announced that a new global standard will allow a passenger to check in for flights using a bar code sent directly to his or her cell phone. When you book your flight, you’ll register your cell phone number and then receive a text message containing a bar code that will serve as your boarding pass. During check-in, a scanner will read the bar code directly off your cell phone screen — all part of a plan to phase out those old-time paper tickets.

Volunteer Vacations

In the past, the typical humanitarian trip focused on constructing housing or building a well, but today people are lining up to take advantage of new and innovative ways to give back while traveling.

Generous Adventures is a volunteer-based organization that travel expert Frommer’s calls “the only all-travel benefit auction on the Internet.” Generous Adventures gets hotel owners and tour operators around the world to donate a travel experience — a day in Panama, a week in Tuscany, six days in the Ecuadorian rainforest — then auctions off the trips on its Web site to bidders who are willing to make helping others a part of their travel experience. In addition to snagging a trip, the winning bidder gets to choose which charity will receive about 45 percent of the price he or she paid for the trip. The charities might include such organizations as Doctors Without Borders, Rainforest Action Network, National Parks Conservation Association, Habitat for Humanity, and the International Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

On any given day, Generous Adventures makes available more than 100 trips from which to choose. For example, if you go to the Galapagos Islands, you can do it with a company called Myths and Mountains: See iguanas in the morning, and teach children English in the afternoon. If you enjoy horseback riding, guides from Relief Riders International will lead you through ancient villages and breathtaking landscapes as you deliver medical supplies and food to remote villages in the Indian state of Rajasthan. If you want to escape to a Caribbean island, you can mix it up with cultural immersion in a Jamaican village through Amizade, a community-driven program that has you relaxing on the beach one day and teaching in a classroom the next.

Traveling as a short-term volunteer differs from the conventional, even romantic, adventure travel and cultural immersion experiences long immortalized in travel stories and films. Instead, a “volunteer vacation” lets you serve and learn firsthand about the host community and its people, while using your skills and interests in an unconventional setting to benefit others.

Are You a “Responsible Tourist”?

Since 1970, when U.S. President Richard Nixon proclaimed the first Earth Day, environmentalists have become a driving force steering environmental awareness around the world. Through Earth Day Network, activists connect, interact, and impact their communities, and create positive change in local, national, and global policies. Now this activism has been extended to what is called ecotourism, green travel, and “responsible tourism.”

Ecotourism traces sustainability within environmentalism. It embraces goals as far ranging as Third World development and tourism and the emergence of pro-poor tourism. For travelers, it also includes the search for eco-lodges and green hotels around the world that feature accommodations that are not only environmentally friendly, but work to support local communities and celebrate the growing availability of green travel experiences. Ecotourism also tries to address some of the more difficult issues that ethical travelers face, such as questions about poverty, the politics of boycotting certain destinations, and the environmental impact of travel.

Ecotourism is now being practiced by some of the most luxurious resorts and hotels in the world. “Ecotourism affords travelers the opportunity to directly benefit the people and places they visit by supporting conservation and protecting cultural heritage as well as economic development,” says Brian T. Mullis, president of the Sustainable Tourism Institute. “Taking an eco-friendly vacation provides responsible travelers with an opportunity to do their part.”

The U.S. government is also doing its part. In fall 2007, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Biodiversity Conservation and Economic Growth Project helped Bulgaria capitalize on its natural resources (mountains, beaches, extensive wilderness areas) to increase the number of tourists, the spending per tourist, and the percentage of tourism-generated revenue that stayed in Bulgaria.

In the United States, college students have also created their own innovative ecotourism projects. In the summer of 2007, a team of Dartmouth College students embarked on an unusual 11-week summer road trip to visit more than 30 destinations around the United States. They traveled on the Big Green Bus, an old school bus that has been painted green and modified to run on waste vegetable oil. The purpose of the trip, according to the students’ Web site, was to promote “the use of sustainable energy through education and example” and to foster “awareness about current global energy issues and create dialogue about tangible solutions to those problems.” This was the third tour of the bus, which was inaugurated in summer 2005.

For eco-friendly travelers who want to practice responsible tourism, Travelocity.com offers its customers the chance to offset travel purchased on its Web site through its partnership with the Conservation Fund.

Other useful tips:

• Go to a city that is good for the environment. In the United States, this is Portland, Oregon, ranked Number 1 by SustainLane, a green media company. Other “good” U.S. cities are San Francisco, California; Seattle, Washington; Chicago, Illinois; and Oakland, California.

• Stay at a green hotel.

• Go green when you rent a car.

• Take a vacation with an environmental focus, such as the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms or through Wilderness Volunteers.

Martin Manning is a librarian with U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Information Programs. He loves to travel to New England.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.