Excerpt from Conde Nast Traveller
The architects, hoteliers, space pioneers and designers shaping what travel looks like in 2022 and beyond
For travellers who like to revel in beautiful interiors, the future looks bright. “I think the future is for hotels to feel more like homes away from home,” says Francis Sultana, one of the world’s leading interior designers. Malta-born Sultana is well known for his rich furniture and home designs (and he has even designed a superyacht), but he had never worked on a hotel until the Oetker Collection’s new La Palma, set to open in what was Capri’s first pensione in 1822. Future hotels, he says, will have “all the detailing and personality of a private house, and fabulous art. Luckily, hotel groups are using designers from slightly different fields – such as Peter Merino moving from luxury stores to do the Cheval Blanc in Paris”.
Portia Hart is the founder of Blue Apple Beach Club Cartagena, Colombia, an ecotourism resort on the island of Tierra Bomba, which has achieved B-Corp status, a relative rarity in the hotel industry where greenwashing is all too common. The Blue Apple is heading towards zero waste, its glass and food waste collection service ensuring that 90 per cent of its waste is diverted from landfill. “Currently, we’re focusing on taking our sustainability to the next level,” Hart says. “We plan to integrate a micro regenerative farm and ornamental gardens, which are specially designed to create richer soil and increase hummingbird and butterfly diversity.”
Diversity is the main aim of Kim Macharia, who wants to make careers in space exploration more accessible to people from a wide range of backgrounds. Of the 600 people who have travelled to space, only 12 per cent have been women, and in 2020 NASA had only 18 Black astronauts in its history and even fewer Hispanic ones. New York-based Macharia works for non-profit the Space Frontier Foundation and the Space Prize, which encourages young women to work in the industry through school competitions as a means of overcoming systematic barriers. “In the future, I want to see an industry where everyone gets to participate,” Macahria says. “At the moment women make up just a fifth of employees, and there’s a talent gap. I’d like to see that change, and to see a SpaceX equivalent on every continent.”
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