Keynote Sessions

Our 2013 Adventure Travel World Summit blends the best elements of the nine past Summits. We gain more time together in intimate settings to learn, partner and grow, all while gaining progressive insights from keynote speakers in plenary that will inspire our collective investment in the future of responsible adventure tourism.

The Summit will strike a balance between high-impact, inspirational presentations for the entire delegation with facilitated peer-to-peer collaboration, business-to-business marketplace, delegate-media exchange and interactive learning workshops on real-world case studies – plus, ample time for open social engagement, mixers and networking.

Below is a selection of 2013 Keynotes. Stay tuned, more coming soon.

Pico Iyer // Author

Wonder Never Gets Old: Making Adventure Vital in a Newly Open World

For every one overseas traveler in 1960, there are now 40. We can see the remotest parts of Tibet and Antarctica from our living rooms, on our smartphones. Everywhere we go, we’re greeted by YouTube and McDonald’s. And yet, in the age of global accessibility, the face-to-face encounter grows ever more precious—and necessary—and every meeting with a foreign place upends our every stereotype.

How best to find new treasures on a planet ever more crowded with other travelers, how to recast adventure so we’re always wide awake, how to bring something positive to our destinations, so they can accommodate the world while still remaining themselves? In this keynote talk, we’ll try to imagine new ways of making travel vital in the age of crowds and BlackBerrys and think about everything foreigners can bring to the places we visit so as to sustain them as well as ourselves.

Pico Iyer is a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, an essayist (since 1986) for Time magazine, a frequent contributor to The New York Times and the author of 10 books—among them such travel classics as Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul—as well as 40 introductions to other books. He writes up to 100 articles a year, for magazines from National Geographic to Harper’s and Vanity Fair to The Financial Times, and he’s written liner notes for Leonard Cohen, been a Fellow (twice) at the World Economic Forum and starred in a CNN ad that was part of the “Incredible India” campaign. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages and been sold to Hollywood. A product of Eton, Oxford and Harvard, Iyer was born in Oxford, England to parents from India and grew up between school in England and holidays in his parents’ new home in California. For the past 20 years he has been based in rural Japan, when not traveling to such destinations as Ethiopia, North Korea, Easter Island and Bhutan.

Zita Cobb // Shorefast.org

Requiem or Anthem?

What happens when there are no more fish? What happens to an island after its 400 year-old, one-industry economy collapses because there are no more fish? Zita Cobb tells the story of Fogo Island – an island off an island – located in the Labrador Current, off the Northeast Coast of Newfoundland. It is a story of community tenacity and of business innovation and social entrepreneurship as islanders look for new ways in an old continuity. It is also a story of modernity, of art, of fish, of tourism; it is a story of longing and belonging…of finding new ways with old things.

Zita Cobb grew up in Joe Batt’s Arm, a community of 700 people located on Fogo Island, off the northeast coast of Newfoundland. She went on to a financial career initially in the oil and gas industry. She later moved into high technology and was the chief financial officer of JDS Fitel, and senior vice president of strategy for NASDAQ-traded, fiber optics innovator JDS Uniphase. Zita retired in 2001 to sail and to focus on her philanthropic work. She is keenly interested in the well being of rural communities and the preservation of culture and holding on to ways of knowing. She believes in the transformational power of the arts and in business innovation and social entrepreneurship as tools for effective community development. Zita is the visionary & chief agitator behind the Shorefast Foundation. Shorefast leads a number of innovative projects aimed at the cultural and economic resiliency for Fogo Island and Change Islands. The recently launched Fogo Island Inn is a Shorefast initiative.

Destination Renaissance // Restorative Tourism

There is not an unblemished destination on our planet free from troubles caused by natural disaster or humans. Shaping tourism in the aftermath of turbulent times is a daunting endeavor requiring exceptional vision, patience, resilience, (com)passion and serious conviction. To provide hope, a framework and a path to recovery for adventure tourism communities worldwide who face similar challenges, we will hear first person raw accounts, sometimes painful, from our colleagues who have endured much in recent times. From opposite sides of the world – the former Yugoslavia and Colombia – these case studies will illustrate how they are creating long term peace and prosperity through adventure travel.

The Return of the Balkans

Despite its communist status, back in the day, Yugoslavia was a prime holiday destination. People came to this Adriatic nation to lounge on its beaches, ski its mountains and sample Mediterranean fare with a decidedly southern-Slav twist. Of course, most of us just remember the 1990s. That’s when the country disintegrated into a vicious civil war that cast a shadow over the region. Those days are numbered, though. Despite the hardships, suffering and lasting prejudices, the peoples of the Balkans today have a new will and ability to capitalize on their holiday heritage. Yugoslavia today is now seven countries, each with its own stories to tell and distinctive identities. If “peace works better than conflict,” as the former U.S. President Bill Clinton said about the Balkans earlier this year, how do we heal such fresh wounds and create a better understanding in the Balkans of what travelers seek? How can travel foster mutual respect, promote environmental standards and lead to a sustainable industry in a land of hardscrabble economics?

We will hear the stories of three young and pioneering adventure travel entrepreneurs from Croatia, Slovenia and Montenegro who will offer their own personal and professional experiences about what they endured and are now contributing to this dynamic region facing tremendous change.

Peace in a Post-war, Post-cartel Colombia

Military conflict in Colombia has decreased substantially in the last few years and the signing of a peace treaty between military factions, paramilitary groups and the Colombian government seems imminent. The historic violence in the country since the 1960s had only fueled the development of illegal activities such as the drug trade, which generated cash used to fuel more violence. Today, a new generation of Colombians is en route to live life in a post-war, post-cartel country. One industry that is flourishing is adventure travel. Colombians themselves, along with the rest of the world, are “discovering” a country which had been essentially unreachable for the last two generations. Former fighters or victims of conflict are now discovering a new way of life, and tourism is becoming a catalyst for one of the nation’s most viable and sustainable economic solution.

Individuals once directly involved the war and the drug trade will come to tell their stories of transformation and illustrate how the power of tourism has become as a catalyst for peace in this country with vast natural and cultural wealth, which has remained untapped for over 40 years.