The Climate Traveler — The NYT 52 List | by Herb Hiller

6 min readJan 6, 2023

I had said in my last post that I would next detail some places where the concept of The Deep Nearby is in play — where places hold themselves out by proactive climate action to a market already sensitized to climate travel. But let’s push this back for some newsworthy handicapping about the 52 Places List that’s The New York Times roundup of experiences worth adopting for personal travel in the year ahead.

The news should be a wake-up for anyone that hasn’t paid attention to the climate adverse impacts of mass tourism and to the need to offset a consolidation of power by travel industry greenwashing and foot dragging.

For the first time in U.S. history, the omnibus spending bill for 2023 signed into law by President Biden funds an assistant secretary for travel and tourism in the Commerce Department long sought by the industry. U.S. Travel Association President and CEO Geoff Freeman called this “a tremendous win for travelers, the travel industry and America’s economy.” The USTA represents the American travel industry. It does not speak to the rethinking of extractive travel.

In one sense this is merely the upgrade of a National Office of Travel and Tourism meant to help the travel industry overcome problems in the smooth flow of international tourism, like long visa waits or aviation security. But the new administration will also likely reaffirm its liaison to Brand USA. And Brand USA is the public-private destination organization modeled on and headed since its inception 10 years ago by a former Visit Florida CEO dedicated to marketing that’s mainly funded by 10 percent of visa application fees, by state governments, and matched only by private sector overseas marketing dollars that the industry would likely spend anyway. The legislation also restored $250 million in additional visa fees for a one-time Brand USA budget boost coming out of Covid setbacks.

The 52 List as counterweight

Comment that accompanied the NYT 2022 52 List selections became additionally significant when the list itself was renamed “52 Places for a Changed World,” adding that “The 52 List highlights places around the globe where travelers can be part of the solution.”

So here we have leisure travel that’s more than feel-good but as climate action itself. Or as travel editor Amy Vershup already said when she was new in the job just before Covid in 2019, “I wanted us to make climate change a priority. . . We thought putting them on the list could help raise important red flags.”

Obviously there was a problem that travelers could help remedy, a subject that The Times further addressed immediately following the list’s publication in 2022. It was doubling down on its shift away from celebrity-driven or otherwise ballyhooed experiences — from Las Vegas and Santa Barbara in 2019 — to something eco- and heritage based, to what the travel desk said was “one of our signature pieces of journalism, the annual ’52 Places’ List in a world turned upside down.”

“We are especially keen on places where grass-roots efforts are pushing transformation, making their patch of the world better in the face of all that is wrong.”

The Times itself wanted to become “part of the solution” to what leisure travel had become since its capture by mass tourism in the second half of the 20th century.

So the 2022 list instead led with Chioggia, Italy, near Venice, with

its own canals, its handsome buildings, and bridging walkways “that creates an escape valve for over tourism,” and included Vanuatu, where visitors can “Explore blue lagoons on a fragile Pacific archipelago that is challenging the world on climate change.”

Of course there was other commentary through the year, notably in books that complained about beach tourism like Sarah Stodola’s The Last Resort; in a Kenyan collaboration about The Big Conservation Lie of safari tourism that I came upon only this year, and a singular piece about Puerto Rico by founding editor Dennis Schaff of Skift, the gold standard of travel research for the industry that he introduced this way: “Puerto Rico tourism, bolstered by Airbnb when hotels were shut, has had a noteworthy comeback. But if travel and living have blended, then the island’s fiscal and political woes can’t be overlooked.” Schaff’s story went on to report on the “impact of Airbnb, tourism, U.S. colonialism, and unfettered development on the island’s people.”

*Courtesy, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy*

What might come next

Schaff was onto something. We have suffered from deep mission creep in hospitality, from when inns lay beyond bailiwicks and attracted not merely Christian pilgrims but also scoundrels of feigned benevolence who robbed them — to the point where the chain hotel trade has turned multi-brand loyalty reward programs like Marriott’s Bonvoy into a control system that’s freakishly now becoming its own profit centers.

The industry now sees hotels as increasingly integrated into how Americans should live. In what one leading chain calls the new “hybrid way of life” or the blending of virtual worksites into “bleisure,” hotels “explore hospitality living” by exploiting new opportunity for family-friendly or longer stay options.

But The Times stands apart in its claim for attention and not the least for how it will likely surprise us again leading off 2023. This of course comes after the close of COP27 in Sharm-al-Sheikh, where tourism seems to have gone without significant attention, even as I pointed out in my first blog that it accounts for $5.81 trillion of global GDP, or 6.1 percent, and contributes roughly 8% to greenhouse gas emissions.

In the real world we’re likely to see massive pushback from a travel industry increasingly under assault. No surprise that when at year’s end The Times interviewed a hubristic Julia Simpson, chief executive of the industry-led World Travel and Tourism Council, she introduced a WTTC initiative into “nature positive travel. . . a big shout-out for nature.” And then spinning that “Some hotels in the tropics are connecting the consumer with the nature around them — often, even food will be sourced locally.” Has the industry adopted woke travel?

Even the typically greenwashing UN World Tourism Organization, published its own now annual list of global tourism villages as exemplars of rural places that immerse visitors in host cultures.

Travel networks are forming that align with climate stewardship, sometimes also referred to as regenerative tourism that ratchets up solutions more positive than Chioggia are for Venice or Vanuatu are for U.S. travelers that both require long distance air travel.

A recent video at The Good Tourism Blog includes this description of regenerative tourism by then Ph.D. candidate Loretta Bellato as different from one more industry niche like adventure or culinary tourism but “rather is a holistic way of thinking in which all stakeholders build reciprocal, beneficial relationships. . . [This] approach to travel seeks to actively improve [italics in original] social and environmental systems and align everything towards sustaining the planet so that all beings can flourish.”

So, might we see a 52 Places List for 2023 that would take up travel as the mutuality between travelers already sensitized to climate action that complements places that honestly hold themselves out for travel to The Deep Nearby?

NOTES

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/travel/52-places-travel-2022.html

https://www.ustravel.org/news/travelers-travel-industry-big- www winners-omnibus

https://.ustravel.org/sites/default/files/media_root/document/BUSA_Background.pdf

https://www.trade.gov/national-travel-and-tourism-office

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/travel/a-different-kind-of-52.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/travel/places-to-visit.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/travel/52-places-travel-2022.html

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-last-resort-sarah-stodola?variant=39703502389282

https://www.nhbs.com/the-big-conservation-lie-book

https://herbhiller.medium.com/the-deep-nearby-cop27-fcb19f7ccb9c

https://skift.com/2022/12/26/the-best-travel-writing-of-the-year-our-favorite-stories-of-2022/; https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/news/puerto-rico-short-term-rental-104500275.html