sustainable tourism

Newspaper Bag Station at Cardamom County

/ Kayleigh Levitt / 1 Comment
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New member of PaperTrails stationed at Cardamom County

At Cardamom County, we have been working to get the local community involved through the group PaperTrails. PaperTrails helps provide jobs for people who could otherwise not get them. La Paz Group has appreciated the way it involves the locals by providing work and  re-purposing old newspaper. For La Paz Group they make gift bags out of recycled newspaper and sanitary bags from recycled paper. Now, we have a new member of the PaperTrails team stationed at Cardamom County. He is stationed on the second level of the Ayurvedic Center and makes bags for all the La Paz Group properties.. We like this because now guests can engage with the paper bag initiative in a new way. They can see how they are made and learn to make them as well.  Continue reading →

So I’ve arrived at Cardamom County

/ Allegra / 2 Comments

This week, I arrived in Thekkady, at the frontier between Kerala and Tamil Nadu. My name is Allegra I’m a french professional who decided to take a break from hectic Paris to learn about entrepreneurial conservation and eco-tourism. I’ll spend the next two months at Cardamom County with Raxa Collective. Cardamom County borders the Periyar Tiger Reserve. As it nears the center of a bustling spice-trading town, I sometimes forget we’re in a forest. Nature always finds a way to remind you though. Continue reading →

2011 Sustainability Roundtable at the Hotel School

/ Timothy Chen / Leave a comment

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the 3rd annual Sustainability Roundtable at Cornell University. The roundtable was attended by several notable industry executives from Marriott, InterContinental, Starwood, and Wyndham. It covered five topics: sustainability across global platforms, standardizing environmental footprints of hotel stays, customer choices, sustainability in the meetings/events sector, and leveraging trends and overcoming barriers in sustainability. Participants came from a wide variety of backgrounds; hospitality franchisors, owners, operators, suppliers, consultants, utility providers, investors, and researchers were all represented. In short, it was a meeting of the best, most passionate minds in sustainable hospitality. Although their discussion covered a wide range of important issues, the session that I found most interesting was “Sustainability and Customer Choices,” which I’ll briefly touch on.

Roger Simons, Manager from Meeting Professionals International (MPI); AJ Singh, Associate Professor of Michigan State University; and Ted Saunders, Director of Sustainability for Saunders Hotel Group partake in a lively discussion at the roundtable that the Center for Hospitality Research hosted.

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From The Galapagos Islands

/ Reyna Oleas / 9 Comments

I am joining Raxa Collective from the Galapagos Islands with the objective of sharing my daily life, project initiatives and global perspectives from this small piece of land that happens to be one of the few places on Earth where sustainable development is still a feasible concept to implement.

But how did I arrive to the Evolution Paradise where Charles Darwin spent important days during his voyage of the Beagle? After getting my B.Sc. in Ecology and Natural Resources Management from Universidad San Francisco de Quito I decided to take a sabbatical year from university studies and became a naturalist guide in the Galapagos. Islanders say that when you drink water from Pelican Bay (a small Bay in Santa Cruz Islands), you will never leave the Islands again. And guess what?…..  It happened to me with the exception that I left the Islands for several years before deciding that this is the place where I want to spend the rest of my life. I am lucky enough to be one of the Ecuadorians that have legal permanent residency in the Islands so I was able to act on that decision. But that is a completely different topic that will be the subject of one of my next dispatches. Continue reading →