Sahara Sunday Spain's Take on Holistic Luxury Travel

I have always been an artist.

Not because I think of myself as particularly creative, per say, but because puzzles have always intrigued me. I like the way things fit together unexpectedly. It’s what drew me to poetry when I was a young child, and what subsequently led me to writing and orchestrating symphonic music. I’ve always liked building intricately connected projects. And perhaps fortunately—coming of age in a post-2008 job market—that type of detail-driven creative thinking was useful in paralegal work and later discovery coordination. 

It was also invaluable during the fifteen-year window that I founded and ran a school for girls in rural Mali. Each cultural misunderstanding required a creative solution, each decision required imaginative village engagement, and each growing pain needed both diplomacy and—somehow!—more government stamps. Despite having started the school at nine years old, my team and I were able to ban FGM and forced child marriage in the village, rally an entire community around a group of forgotten girls, and educate a village of (now) young women. So, creative thinking has certainly led me to where I am today. 

Sequestered Ecotourism

Sequestered Ecotourism is a high concept, multinational, wholistic hospitality company which is two years in the making. Due to its rather enormous scope, it has necessitated a type of complex interdisciplinary matrix that has required creative thinking at every turn. 

After all, the term ‘luxury ecotourism’ seems like an oxymoron. Bringing those two concepts together required a large degree of forethought, which is exactly what today’s new businesses need to do. 

We are no longer in the 90s or early 2000s where the concept of changing global behavior to mitigate energy use or pollution was vaguely theoretical; the boogeyman of limited resources seemed like a science fiction specter and something that the ‘future’ would have to deal with. We are now firmly in a society that both needs and, importantly, values global care - only, corporations have been understandably slow to answer that call. Part of that slow response is at least in part to the perceived impracticality of making nice things sustainable. 

This is why Sequestered Ecotourism was designed from its inception as a fully sustainable, and fully self-contained, luxury hotel experience. Not only limiting our outputs but planning for zero emissions and pollution output has been a critical requirement of each phase in the company’s development. This is not limited to the environmental aspect of the hotels, but the social initiatives planned for the communities that are currently welcoming us as we find our locations around the world. 

A Beginning

Recently, while on a potential hotel site tour abroad, a group of village elders came to me and said, “You are welcome here.” 

I had just thanked them for their interest in participating in the hotel and potentially being a part of their community, (and, also for listening to me speak in the 104of, 40oC, 80% humidity climate we were all suffering under), and after saying, ‘thank you,’ they repeated it: 

“You are welcome here.” 

It was the first time I had considered that as the origin of that phrase. These people had listened to many developers over the years, people who had promised things, given speeches, and offered various opportunities. Yet, it was this hospitality project that the elders were welcoming. It was humbling.

And it continue to be humbling each time we speak to people whose communities will be revitalized through our ecotourism efforts and whose lands will be revitalized as we restore habitats, biomes, and endangered species across the world. Their enthusiasm is such an incredible motivator through the meticulous planning and design phases of each of the location-tailored hotels. 

So many companies, countries, and people with good intentions and little understanding of how to integrate cultures and values creatively have laid claim to developing areas around the world, all the while pushing a type of western-centric globalization onto both landscape and local communities. Sequestered Ecotourism, however, is poised to be a bridge unlike any hospitality industry on the planet. 

Travel, at its core, is also about restoration, reignited imagination, and the rejuvenation that comes with experiencing a new place in all its authenticity. And so it is with excitement that Sequestered Ecotourism brings this new era of regenerative travel to the world. It is with creativity and careful thought I have tried to do my part in inspiring people to come together for generations to come.