Inspiration

The 44 People Changing the Way We Travel

The wandering renegades redirecting the global compass.
Travel Changers

If you're on a trip and start to ask yourself, I wonder who came up with those e-scooters? Or the idea to put TVs in seatbacks on airplanes? Or who designed that beautiful African American museum in Washington, D.C.? Those answers are here, among the 44 game-changers who made the way we see, taste, sail, and circle the world that much more incredible.

  • Cond Nast Traveler Magazine March 2019 The People Changing the Way We Travel
    Lea Cresp/Luzphoto/Eyevine

    Wes Anderson

    How we look at the world depends, among other things, on how other people show it to us. There are few filmmakers with as distinctive and hypnotic a quality of vision as this 49-year-old Texan. You don’t go see The Darjeeling Limited or The Grand Budapest Hotel for a bracing dose of reality. These are exquisitely lucid if not altogether untroubled dreams, stylized to within an inch of anything resembling life. And yet, look again and you’ll see that Anderson has inspired the aesthetic of a generation. His films have made us reconsider what was once twee and dusty, the early-20th-century Mittel-European shtick, vintage revivalist India, and summer-camp Americana. From millennial pink to tea-party chic, it turns out we’re living on Planet Wes after all. Which is cause for celebration rather than alarm. If his movies have a message, it’s an encouraging one—to look again, seek the symmetries, the pleasing rhymes and lovely echoes. Take a moment to smell the perfectly aligned roses, to inhale, like Monsieur Gustave, L’Air de Panache. —Steve King

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    Cherae Robinson

    The allure of Africa stretches far beyond the Big Five. Perhaps the most exciting showcase of its diversity is Tastemakers Africa, the brainchild of Cherae Robinson, an American entrepreneur who wanted to create a platform that would connect travelers with in-the-know locals. With Tastemakers, Robinson is part of a fresh vanguard signaling a cultural shift with a new generation of Africans charting and championing their own continent, which spreads out to a global community hungry for its stories. She describes Tastemakers as “a curated marketplace” for hundreds of experiences—from a jam session with a nine-piece band in Johannesburg to an art tour of Accra with a multimedia artist. On Instagram, the @tstmkrafrica account posts pictures from its network of Africa-based influencers rescripting the narrative of inspired travel from Casablanca to Kigali. —S.K.

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    Dara Khosrowshahi

    Born in Tehran in 1969, Iranian-American businessman Dara Khosrowshahi, previously the CEO of Expedia for 12 years, is turning around Uber. In August 2017, Uber reportedly paid him $200 million to take on the top job at the embattled ride-hailing firm. Despite years of missteps by Uber cofounder and CEO Travis Kalanick, the company is currently valued at $76 billion—with 4 billion trips made in 2017 alone—but at the time of Khosrowshahi’s hiring its reputation had never been lower. Uber, which has built its fortune on fighting regulators and rivals, has since taken on a more humble, considered corporate persona. There’s no doubting its impact on how we get from A to B, not just in our hometowns but on vacation too. Born out of a snowy evening in Paris when its founders couldn’t get a cab, Uber now operates in 65 countries, offering not only taxis but boats for island hopping around Croatia, helicopters on the French Riviera, snowmobiles in the Alps, and long-distance driver services in Bali, India, and Sri Lanka. But if Uber is to ensure its long-term success, it will need a lot more of Khosrowshahi’s expert business acumen and professional pragmatism. —James Temperton

  • Allison V. Smith/@allisonvsmith

    Liz Lambert

    It wouldn’t be right to say that her hotels put Austin on the map, but they’ve done an enormous amount to consolidate its reputation as the epicenter of a particular kind of cool, a town where hippies, hipsters, and cowboys can come together over breakfast tacos. Liz Lambert wasn’t sure what she was doing when she took over the run-down Hotel San José in Austin in 1995. She just knew she wanted to turn it into something that would feel good and connect guests with the place where they were staying, a commune for like-minded rock ’n’ roll souls with integrity and meaning. Today the Bunkhouse Group comprises seven hotels, including one in Mexico. Well, six hotels plus El Cosmico, part high-end trailer park, part art installation. All are adored with wild, cultish fervor. —S.K.

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    Yayoi Kusama

    The creator of what may very well be the most photographed art installations in the world is an 89-year-old Japanese artist who professes a close personal kinship with pumpkins and has spent much of her life as a voluntary resident of a Tokyo mental hospital. Yayoi Kusama’s work raises all manner of interesting questions about childhood, identity, gender, and sexuality. For better or worse, such questions have been overtaken of late by the selfie phenomenon. Last year, at exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles, gallery goers lined up for hours to spend 30 to 60 seconds in the presence of some of her kaleidoscopic creations. Thousands came, leaving an untold number of Instagram posts in their wake. This is artwork as celebrity, the Mona Lisa for the Instagram generation. Kusama’s pieces, which are undeniably photogenic, have titles such as With All My Love for the Tulips, I Pray Forever and Longing for Eternity. Forever? Eternity? Maybe 30 seconds is, after all, enough. —S.K.

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    Barry Sternlicht

    More than almost anyone else this century, Barry Sternlicht has shaped the hotel experience as we know it. The founder, chairman, and CEO of private investment firm Starwood Capital Group launched W Hotels, the brash boutique brand that has become a stage for the modern jet set from New York to Oman; he took St. Regis from a single hotel to the global gold standard for classic luxury; and, more recently, his hotel management company SH Hotels and Resorts shook off Baccarat Hotels’ fustiness to make it a sleek hideout for urban sophisticates. But Sternlicht, an environmental activist and the son of a Polish Holocaust survivor, is punctuating his legacy with the 1 Hotels brand, a wellness-oriented, eco-friendly chain that first rolled out in Miami and Brooklyn (WeHo, Cabo, Kauai, and China’s Sanya are in the pipeline). You won’t find any plastic bottles in the airy rooms built from reclaimed materials, but most of the highest-impact changes are invisible, from organic cotton mattresses to reduced electricity usage, proving that you can, as he has said, “live well and still live a sustainable life.” —Alex Postman

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    Samin Nosrat

    Not too long ago, Samin Nosrat had just one television credit on her résumé—a brief appearance on Michael Pollan’s Cooked. But a lot can happen in a year. Her Netflix show, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, born out of her bestselling cookbook of the same name, has quickly become a breakout hit, changing the way we think and talk about food. And yet the Iranian-American chef’s on-screen warmth, curiosity, and joyful sense of humor make her totally relatable. When she makes pesto in Liguria you long to stand beside her, pounding garlic cloves and basil leaves with a mortar and pestle, and when she sits down with friends to eat the crispy tahdig rice she prepared with her mother, you wish you could pull up a chair. It’s all part of Nosrat’s ongoing message: that all of us can learn how to cook, and learn to cook well. With the exception of her former workplace Chez Panisse, you won’t find any Michelin-starred restaurants on her show. Instead, she champions the local chefs, home cooks, and artisans working behind the scenes. We meet a fifth-generation soy sauce producer in Japan, learn about Parmesan from an Italian cheesemaker, and watch Nosrat taste some of the world’s best honey with farmers in Tixcacaltuyub, Mexico. The biggest game changer, though? We get see a woman starring on food-and- travel television, still a rarity in 2019. You could say she’s the next Julia Child—or maybe even the next Anthony Bourdain—but really, she’s 100 percent Samin Nosrat. And that’s what makes her arrival so exciting. —Lale Arikoglu

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    Sir Richard Branson

    We challenge you to think of an individual who has had as much impact on our industry as Sir Richard. Over his four decades in the travel sphere, the British entrepreneur has revolutionized airline travel. His Virgin Atlantic airlines introduced, in 1991, the single greatest gift to the long-haul traveler—personal screens affixed to seat backs. He breathed new life into old buildings with Virgin Hotels—his first, in Chicago, took over the 26-story, Art Deco Old Dearborn Bank Building—and this year he’ll open properties in San Francisco, New York, Dallas, and Las Vegas, in what was once the Hard Rock Hotel. He’s also been working on launching tourists into space with Virgin Galactic. But it’s his latest venture that sets out to achieve the truly impossible: turn high-taste millennials on to cruising. And so far, it seems he is doing everything right. When his first Virgin Voyages ship sets sail in 2020, it’ll have suites dreamed up by Roman and Williams, a Tom Dixon–designed restaurant, a drag cabaret, and a tattoo parlor, because, well, millennials. All that’s really left for Virgin is to jump into the private jet game. But we’ll let him take us into the cosmos first. —Erin Florio

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    Daniele Kihlgren

    Nearly 20 years ago, Daniele Kihlgren was riding his motorcycle through Abruzzo, in central Italy, six hours from his native Milan, when he stopped at the medieval town of Santo Stefano di Sessanio, all but abandoned when its inhabitants scattered to the cities for work. In its stone-walled houses and crooked alleyways, he recognized that Italy’s “minor heritage”—less majestic than the country’s Roman amphitheaters and Renaissance frescoes, but no less culturally critical—was at risk of extinction. With a $5 million investment he returned to transform the hamlet into an albergo diffuso, a “dispersed hotel” carved out of existing houses and filled with impeccable period homages (creaking wooden doors, uneven floors, rough-hewn tables—all modern tech tucked out of sight). He did the same in the southern village of Matera, restoring dozens of ancient sassi cave dwellings. Sextantio Le Grotte della Civita, like Sextantio Santo Stefano, has not only revived the local economy by luring affluent aesthetes to this once forgotten outpost, it has redefined the concept of luxury. While he’s raising funds to restore additional Italian hamlets, Kihlgren’s next move is to Africa, where he’s creating a hotel comprising mud huts on serene Lake Kivu in Rwanda, an area that survived the 1994 genocide. Like all his work, it will act as a bulwark against the new and unimproved, inviting visitors without sacrificing its essential character. —A.P.

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    Sir David Adjaye

    Regardless of the size of the buildings they build, most architects exist in neatly labeled compartments. U.K.-based, Tanzanian-born Sir David Adjaye is an exception. Yes, he’s done retail shops (Valextra in London; Proenza Schouler in New York) and residences in cities that include London, Johannesburg, Doha, and New York. He’s even reimagined the 421-acre complex that makes up the San Francisco shipyard. But he’s also taken on commissions in Accra, Lagos, and Dakar, as well as some of the most emotionally fraught public projects of recent times. This versatility may in part owe to his peripatetic childhood—his Ghanaian father was a diplomat stationed in Tanzania when Adjaye was born, but they moved often, to places like Saudi Arabia, Kenya, and Lebanon. Many believe the design that will define his career is the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (seven months after its opening, Time magazine named Adjaye one of its 100 Most Influential People of 2017). Its tiered shape—golden and crownlike—is both beautiful and moving, echoing the traditional forms of the Yoruba people of West Africa. Adjaye’s breadth of vision, looking beyond the usual reference points, is what makes him such a powerful voice on the global architectural landscape. —S.K.

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    ASH NYC

    When most of us were treading water in those early post-college years, clinging to the bottom rung of some corporate ladder we had no real intention of climbing, the young (as in 20-something) partners of the developer-designer firm ASH NYC were slowly, steadily building up a real estate empire, buying and developing condo buildings in soon-to-be hot Brooklyn neighborhoods like Bushwick and Greenpoint. In 2014, with the desire to create something that they could hold onto rather than rent or sell, and that they could curate from top to bottom, they opened the Dean, a 52-room hotel in a former 1912 clergy house in Providence, finally giving the town a hotel that was reflective of its creative, progressive culture (and where Brown and RISD students and alum would actually want to stay) and turning Providence into a hip long-weekend destination for New Yorkers and Bostonians. Using the Dean as a template—interesting historic building in an undersaturated second city—ASH opened The Siren in downtown Detroit last year, a crumbling Renaissance Revival building turned old world glam hotel, and suddenly, it seemed the buzz about a Detroit comeback just might be true. This past fall, ASH opened Hotel Peter and Paul in New Orleans's bohemian Marigny neighborhood, turning an 1860s church complex into a 71-guest room hotel, furnished with custom gingham fabrics and hand-painted credenzas that reference the trompe l’oeil walls at L’Institut Guerlain in Paris, and showcasing a sophisticated side of New Orleans that has nothing to do with Bourbon Street and beads. Next up, an early 1900s building in Baltimore that once housed bachelor apartments. Beyond that, we’ll have to wait and see. But if ASH works its magic, who knows, Topeka could just be the next it city. —Rebecca Misner

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    Anne Hidalgo

    Paris’s Socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo is on a mission to rid the city of all but electric vehicles by 2030. And she’s well on her way to doing it… sort of. She’s already banned older, more pollution-causing cars, and the city is car-free every first Sunday of every month (even the Champs Élysées!), a program she intends to expand to every Sunday of the month by next year. Now Hidalgo, who’s also chairwoman of C40, a network of the world’s largest cities committed to tackling climate change, is fighting for the most ambitious part of her plan: creating a two-square mile pedestrian zone on the Right Bank running from the Louvre to the Bastille. Whether you agree with the measures she’s taken or not—and she has plenty of critics who claim these pedestrian zones cause traffic jams in other parts of the city—it’s hard to deny that something has to be done. “Cities produce 70 percent of greenhouse gases,” she said back in 2017. A staggering fact, yes. And for Hidalgo, a call to action. —Lauren DeCarlo

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    Elizabeth Becker

    When author and journalist Elizabeth Becker was researching overtourism for her 2013 book, Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, she found many people nonplussed, unaware of the gravity of the situation altogether. “People didn’t understand what I was looking at,” she told us in an interview earlier this year. She was, by all accounts, ahead of the curve: Fast-forward five years to the present day, and overtourism is almost as closely associated with Venice as its storied canals, and as much with Barcelona as tapas. Becker is facilitating the conversation everywhere from BBC World News to forums at George Washington University, all the while showing just how dynamic the discussion around overtourism can and should be—travel is an industry, she reminds us, and a large part of ethical travel is considering the bones and people of a place we’re visiting. How can we travel responsibly? How to really see the heart of a place, without compromising it for the travelers who’ll follow—and the people who remain? What, as travelers, can we do better, and better? These are all questions to ask, and we have Becker to thank for them. —Katherine LaGrave

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    Jochen Zeitz

    Credited with turning the Puma brand around a quarter of a century ago, this dynamic German businessman changed our perceptions of capitalism by sticking to sound ethical principles. Never one to rest on his sustainable laurels, Zeitz recently set up The B Team with Richard Branson, a non-profit organization determined to ensure that big businesses account for their impact on the environment. His sphere of influence is phenomenal and expanding all the time. One of Zeitz’s favorite sayings is ‘think globally, act locally.’ After falling in love with Africa on his first safari, he went back and bought 50,000 acres in Kenya, creating Segera, a self-sustaining wildlife reserve and eco retreat. When he began collecting contemporary African art, the idea of founding a museum on the continent was born. The Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, which opened in Cape Town last September, serves as a bold and vivid statement that Africa is a constantly evolving place, rich with positivity and creativity. Indeed, no sooner had the noise surrounding Zeitz MOCAA died down than the superb Norval Foundation museum opened in nearby Steenberg. It looks like the Face of Responsible Capitalism has just started another revolution. —Peter Browne

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    Massimo Bottura

    When this chef opened his first trattoria some 30 years ago, the locals in Modena, northern Italy, were skeptical about his take on their staple dishes. They’ve since come round and Osteria Francescana is perennially named one of the world’s top three restaurants. Alongside Redzepi and Adrià, Bottura spearheaded the devotion to serious foodie pilgrimages. And yet here is a chef at the top of his game not just focused on stars but on making a real difference to how we can eat more sustainably and mindfully. He’s now the champion of the anti-waste movement, with his Food for Soul initiative resonating on menus from Brighton to Hudson Valley. —S.K.

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    Rei Kawakubo and Adrian Joffe

    Dover Street Market wasn’t the first concept store. Before it came the Milanese institution 10 Corso Como, where Carla Sozzani’s idiosyncratic fashion edit and treasure trove of curios have made the shop a fixture on the city’s must-see list, up there with the Duomo and La Scala. And, of course, there was Colette, Mme Rousseaux’s much-missed fashion Mecca on the rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, which was less a conventionally put-together shop, more an exuberant expression of self. But it is Rei Kawakubo and Adrian Joffe who have perfected the fashion boutique as curated, gallery-like cultural experience. The husband-and-wife team—she the Japanese design visionary, he the CEO of her anti-fashion brand Comme des Garçons—opened their first DSM on Dover Street in Mayfair in 2005, before moving it in 2016, with typical counter-intuitive brio, round the corner to Haymarket, until then arguably central London’s dowdiest street. Set over five floors, the current flagship is the closest retail gets to immersive theatre, a higgledy piggle of wildly contrasting concessions, wrought-iron cages and jerry-built shacks, all of them stocked with avant-garde design. As well as single-handedly reorienting the London fashion map, they have taken the brand global with outposts in Tokyo, Singapore, New York, Beijing and Downtown L.A.—all of them unique, all of them experiences in their own right. —David Annand

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    Sir David Attenborough

    At the time he joined the BBC as a trainee in 1952, Attenborough had only seen one TV show. He went on, of course, to present many of the most-watched and best-loved natural-history programs ever, seen by countless hundreds of millions (Life on Earth alone had some 500 million viewers worldwide when it aired in 1979). He insists that he didn’t approach filmmaking with any kind of conservation agenda—he merely wished to share the delight he took in observing interesting people, places, plants and animals. In the process he has probably done more than anyone else alive today to alert us not only to nature’s wonders but also the threats it faces. Such is his authority that a few minutes of his Blue Planet II addressing the matter of plastic waste were enough to provoke policy changes at the highest levels of government. Attenborough just turned 92. The ruffled quiff is thinner these days than it used to be, the instantly recognizable voice a little huskier. Yet he continues to inspire, to alter the way we look at and think about the world we inhabit. His great aim, he has often said, is simply to remind people of the interconnectedness of living things. “We are all part of the deal.” —S.K.

  • Courtesy The Hoxton

    Sharan Pasricha

    Hotels were already a third career for Indian-born entrepreneur Pasricha when he founded Ennismore in 2011, buying the then six-year-old Hoxton hotel in Shoreditch from Pret co-founder Sinclair Beecham a year later. Before then, Pasricha had sold a student marketing start-up while still at university, then returned to Delhi to turn his family’s ailing lederhosen-producing factory into a proper leather-goods player. ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’ is how the 37-year-old describes himself. But having already accomplished the neighborhood-hotel-as-hangout with Hoxton (which expanded to a second in Holborn in 2014; it’s now in Amsterdam and Paris, and soon to roll out across the U.S.), he deftly swung a curveball snatching up the creaky but stately Scottish property Gleneagles in 2015 and repositioning it not just as a golf hotel but the gateway to the Highlands. There’s an echo in the blueprint to both, though: covetable design (for Gleneagles: David Collins Studio, Timorous Beasties; for Hoxton Paris they called on Soho House—which, incidentally, Pasricha once tried to buy), clever branding, and thrumming social spaces. Next, he tries his hand at reinventing the budget hotel with NoCo. Something tells us he might master that too. —Fiona Kerr

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    Thierry Teyssier

    A solid decade before buzzwords like “bespoke” and “immersive” travel were thrown around by concierge worldwide, and Instagram feeds humbly bragged about local cooking classes and day trips to weaving cooperatives, there was hotelier Thierry Teyssier and his kasbah chic hotel Dar Ahlam in the Moroccan desert. There, Teyssier took guest-centric hospitality to a new level. Picture it, you’re in the middle of seemingly nowhere and you say, ‘tonight for dinner we’re thinking pigeon… in a 12th century Berber village… by candlelight.’ Boom. It happens. He played with customization again when, three years ago, he kicked-off the Route du Sud, a one-booking-at-a-time, five-destination exploration of remote southern Morocco. Now, Teyssier is once again pushing the boundaries of experiential travel with his latest concept, 700,000 Heures, a nomadic hotel that opens in a new location every few months (the operation is currently in Siem Reap, Cambodia before it heads to Lancois, Brazil in June). Teyssier himself will be present at every location, part host, part operations manager, and he’s organized 700,000 Heures as membership based club in order to truly get to know his guests so that subsequent trips become increasingly personalized. If he learns you love Chopin, a surprise moonlight concert at some point during the next trip is highly likely. —R.M.

  • Peter Yang/Courtesy Airbnb

    Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk

    The story is stuff of legend: San Francisco roommates Brian and Joe were struggling to pay the rent. There was a big conference coming to town and hotels were booked solid. Why not put three inflatable mattresses on the living-room floor and advertise them online? A third friend, Nathan, who knew about computer stuff, was enlisted to sort the website. They called it Airbnb. That was in 2008. A decade later it’s a $30 billion behemoth, an icon of the sharing economy, which has transformed the travel choices of millions. Sure, couch-surfing or house swapping wasn’t new, but what the trio did was different, they created trust and human connections. They made it look safe, they made it look easy, they made it look desirable. Now they have introduced guided tours, hosted experiences, and a restaurant-reservation service, aiming not just at disrupting the hotel business but the whole travel industry. True, it hasn’t always been plain sailing and Airbnb isn’t beyond criticism. But it has changed everything. —S.K.

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    David Neeleman

    A personal TV at every seat. That’s really all it took to hook Americans on the low-cost, high-frills airline JetBlue back when it launched in 2000. Well, that and leather seats, better coffee, extra legroom, and a bit of cleverness on the part of founder David Neeleman. His simple solutions would not only release us from the subtle injustices we suffered post-Golden Age of Flying, when nothing about economy air travel was glamorous, but inspire competitors to keep up with an upstart. “Low-cost” didn’t have to mean “budget” or “soul-crushing” anymore—Neeleman was interested in, “bringing humanity back to air travel,” and he’s been fairly unstoppable in his years as an airline entrepreneur. In a little over three decades, he has founded or worked for an astounding six airlines: He cut his teeth by co-launching Morris Air at just 25-years-old and sold it to Southwest Airlines for a reported $129 million—at the age of 29. From there, he co-founded WestJet, now Canada’s second-largest airline, and a Brazilian clone of JetBlue, Azul, now the third-largest airline in the country. He’s currently co-owner of TAP Air Portugal, a legacy airline that has managed to fly record-breaking numbers of American tourists to Portugal in the past year (sorry, Lisbon). Next up? Neeleman has plans for a new U.S. budget airline set to fly in 2021. Its name mimics his business style: Moxy. —Laura Dannen Redman

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    Richard Fain

    When Richard Fain, CEO, Royal Caribbean Cruises, got into the cruise industry 30 years ago, the whole thing was suffering from an inferiority complex. Airline travel was glam (hell, we still had the Concorde), and well-heeled travelers were looking for ever-more-interesting places to go. They didn’t want a sleepy vacation, and they definitely didn’t want to to dine at buffets or be lumped with crowds—all tropes pervasive to the cruise industry. But three decades later, you can thank Fain’s innovations at Royal Caribbean Cruises, Ltd.—whose portfolio includes Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, Silversea, and Azamara—for giving cruising its much-deserved place in the sun and shifting the collective mindset. For starters, you’re not sedentary on his ships unless you want to be: this is the man who brought zip-lining, rock-climbing, and the world’s first ice-skating rink to sea. He also overhauled dining options and brought Starbucks, Johnny Rockets, and restaurants by celebrity chefs on board. With the launch of Celebrity’s Edge—arguably the year’s most talked-about ship launch—he introduced a new ship design with a moving deck that can evolve from restaurant to vehicle for tendering guests for shore excursions, and “endless” in-room balconies. The company’s just-opened, modern terminal in Port Miami and newly launched tech now take guests “from car to bar in 10 minutes,” streamlining their experience and vacation in a way that shows cruising didn’t just catch up. It’s ahead. —Corina Quinn

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    Toby Sun and Brad Bao

    Just one year ago Toby Sun and Brad Bao saw that cities like New York and London had infrastructure that could support Citi Bikes and Boris bikes respectively. But what about smaller cities, like, Seattle? They needed something different. Something dockless. So Sun and Bao started dropping electric bikes in college towns, like Greensboro, North Carolina. After that, they moved onto scooters, ones that were capable of zipping 15 mph with the help of an electric motor. Sun and Bao’s company, Lime, now has scooters in more than 65 U.S. cities—major ones including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Dallas— as well as a handful overseas including Berlin, Zurich, and Brisbane. Last summer they raised $335 million from companies like Uber and Google. More than the e-bikes, the dock-less scooters are redefining how far we can go on our own two feet, making sprawling, un-walkable downtowns easy to maneuver and neighborhoods that are just too far to walk but too close to drive seem just around the corner. Now, Lime is even on Google Maps alongside walking, driving, public transit, and rideshare as a way to get from A to B in 13 cities around the world. That’s one hell of a legitimization. —Meredith Carey

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    Richard Anderson

    Amtrak has long been the butt of many a joke, a much-maligned train service with riders casting a longing eye toward the efficiency of the Eurostar and speediness of the shinkansen. We may never get there, sure, but the tide seems to be changing, and it’s in large part thanks to the company’s CEO and President Richard Anderson, who has been at the helm since June 2017. Anderson in charge is no accident: He’s the former CEO of Northwest and Delta Air Lines, and has used his post to position Amtrak as the anti-airline alternative, with ad campaigns criticizing “shrinking [airline] legroom” and pointing out that Amtrak offers passengers “two free checked bags” and “zero middle seats.” Under Anderson, hundreds of trains have gotten interior makeovers; food options have improved, too, as have Wi-Fi speeds and strength. Still, Anderson has adopted several airline tactics, including pushing out three- and four-day fare sales, and implementing pricing discounts for tickets booked at least three weeks before travel. It seems to be paying off: This year Amtrak this year has shrunk its operating losses and grown its revenue to record numbers. —K.L.

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    Chad and Blake Pike

    As a kid in Ohio, Chad Pike used to spend his spare time building treehouses beside a creek so that he and his buddies could go fishing and hang out. Thirty-odd years later, despite the distractions of a full-time job as a vice-chairman at financial-services giant Blackstone, he’s doing similar things, only in more exotic locations, and with, you know, staff and helicopters. It began in 2008 when he bought a characterful old fixer-upper in Crested Butte, Colorado, which happened to come with private access to some of the best skiing in the Rockies. His wife Blake elevated the interiors to a new level of sumptuous cosiness, and a family holiday house morphed into the foundation of a brand, Eleven Experience, which has taken adventurous, get-out-and-get-stuck-in travel to a new level. The portfolio now includes half a dozen impeccable, small-scale lodges, at once super-high-spec and endearingly laid-back, in America, Europe and the Caribbean. Exemplary among them is Deplar Farm, on the sublime Troll Peninsula of northern Iceland, where the fishing in summer is as good as the skiing in winter, and the combination of mountain and ocean scenery is as dramatic as anywhere on the face of the earth. —S.K.

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    Diller Scofidio + Renfro

    The New York–based design firm is behind some of the most have-to-travel-for museums on the planet, including Los Angeles's Broad, the 2016 expansion of the MoMA and, next year, the hotly anticipated Museum of Image and Sound on Rio's Copacabana. But what makes the studio stand out is its ability to think beyond the typical brick-and-mortar boundaries of conventional architecture by creating spaces you'll actually want to hang out in—in previously discarded urban wastelands. Case in point: New York City's High Line, the 1.45-mile urban park on abandoned railway tracks that they outfitted with flower beds, loungers and scattered artwork that transformed Manhattan's west side into a hub for locals and visitors. Though perhaps even more impact was made by their 15-month old Zaryadye Park in Moscow, whose landscaping and pavilions attracted more than one million visitors...in its first month. –E.F.

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  • Annegré Bosman/Pluk Media/Courtesy African Parks

    Peter Fearnhead

    Fifteen years ago, Majete Wildlife Reserve in Malawi was a forested wasteland, with just a few antelope wandering its perimeter. But today a visitor there would encounter elephant, zebra, lion, eland, kudu and more—such a menagerie, in fact, that by late 2017 Majete had airlifted 154 ellies to another poached-out reserve clear on the other side of the country. Meanwhile, tourism to the park grew more than 14 percent in two years with the opening of a new lodge, bringing needed income to the reserve and local communities. This is just one cog in a master plan to rewild some of the continent’s most barren spaces dreamed up in no small part by Peter Fearnhead, the mild-mannered but tenacious co-founder and CEO of African Parks, who’s helping to write a hopeful chapter in a conservation narrative typically dominated by heartbreak and loss (see: the recent death of the last Northern White male rhino). He’s been scheming it for ages: At 13, the Zimbabwe native persuaded his school to develop a wildlife reserve on its campus. Today the foundation’s model succeeds by lassoing foreign funding ($88 million last year) to restore habitats and wildlife in parks that the nonprofit then manages—from law enforcement to reintroducing species—for governments too strapped to protect their wild spaces. Founded in 2000, African Parks now oversees 15 parks in 9 countries from Chad to the Congo, with a goal of 20 by 2020. It doesn’t hurt their chances that Prince Harry was installed as its president in 2017. Add to that the partnership deals with high-end lodges like King Lewanika in Zambia’s Liuwa Plain, now with the second largest wildebeest migration on the continent; and soon-to-open Magashi Camp in Rwanda’s Akagera National Park, as of 2018 home to the Big 5; and it’s a safe bet that African Parks will continue filling the map with new life and landscapes—not to mention human livelihoods—for years to come. —A.P.

  • Getty

    Paul Nicklen

    A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but if you’re photographer and conservationist Paul Nicklen it means that your your picture will likely be seen by nearly 4.8 million of your Instagram followers (that’s roughly the population of Alabama, for context). Nicklen is using his reach to spark a conversation about climate change and ocean conservation, taking us deep into the freezing waters of the Arctic and Antarctic—and uncomfortably close to toothy leopard seals, starving polar bears, and sperm whales more majestic than you can imagine. What’s more, his work is a rallying cry to save our oceans: Nicklen, a National Geographic contributor also co-founded Sea Legacy, a non-profit organization committed to sustainable fisheries, revitalizing coral reefs, and green ocean farming. Through his extraordinary photography, he’s forcing all of us to pay more attention to the parts of the world we may never travel to, but ones that we’d like to at least exist in 10 years. —M.C.

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  • Courtesy Summit

    Jeff Rosenthal, Elliot Bisnow, Brett Leve, Jeremy Schwartz and Ryan Begelman

    In 2008, five aspirational twenty-somethings sat down and cold-called entrepreneurs they admired to try to convince them to come on a ski trip in Park City, Utah. It was the first outing of Summit Series, a roving think-tank-meets-festival-meets-TED/Davos/Google Camp that attracts millennial multi-hyphenates (so-called future thought-leaders) to gatherings in Tulum or Downtown LA, to a safari in Kenya or on a cruise ship from Miami to the Bahamas. That first summit drew 19 people, the second, later that year, was held in Playa del Carmen (still paid for on the founders’ credit cards), by the third the quintet were curating a panel of entrepreneurs to gather at the White House. Today, figures such as Quentin Tarantino, Herbie Hancock, Jeff Bezos, and Malcolm Gladwell speak at their get-togethers. But they have even grander plans. High up in Utah, improbably placed between the towns of Eden and Paradise, is Powder Mountain, which the Summiters bought in 2013 with $40 million from backers including Richard Branson. The idea is to create a utopian community, somewhere their network can live and work and, you know, solve the world’s most pressing problems. —F.K.

  • Florian Groehn

    David Caon

    Think of this Sydney-based industrial designer as a champion of the long-haul traveler. You may not immediately notice his impact, the way he incorporates beauty and function on, say, Qantas's mammoth Perth-to-London route, but you'll feel it when you arrive after 17 hours in the air refreshed and ready to hit the ground running. Caon gave Qantas Dreamliners porcelain tableware designed to create less clatter as it moves between the aisle (with an 11 percent reduction in weight compared to standard inflight tableware, which will save tons of jet fuel each year), introduced an LED lighting system into Boeing cabins to be less invasive for passengers, and redesigned seats in upper cabins so travelers can get as much restorative rest as possible. His high-function, high-design ethos starts before you get onboard, however, designing airport lounges in the places where the world's longest flights depart from (he added curved ceilings and a neutral palette to Perth's to help capture as much natural Western Australian sunlight as possible which in turn is supposed to help your body adjust to the time difference more easily). This year he will work on lounges in Hong Kong and Singapore, where Singapore Airlines' 20-hour flight to New York recently replaced the Perth-London route as the longest in the world. —E.F.