The Global Basecamps Blog

When most Americans think about Denmark, if they think about Denmark, it's probably something along the lines of being near Sweden and Norway or eating strange fermented fish (or is that Iceland?) or not much at all. In general Denmark lacks an identity with foreign tourists and the sensitive geniuses at Visit Denmark, the country's tourism board, decided that the best way to get men to visit was to focus on two main selling points:

1. Danish women are blonde and beautiful
2. Danish women get drunk and have unprotected sex with strange foreign men they meet in bars

But how do you launch a campaign (outside of Maxim Magazine) that will hit your target audience without grossing out everyone else in the process?

In what we think is quite possibly the best Q&A ever on the nature of Sustainable Travel, Tripwolf writer Adena Harford suffers through a barrage of long-winded but eminently entertaining and enlightening answers to her most vexing questions relating to sustainable travel.

Thanks Adena, any time you've got questions I've got 3-5 hours to answer them.

When most people think about sustainable travel they usually imagine low-impact huts in the rainforest or tented safari camps out under the shadow of Kili. We're actually seeing the biggest steps with the smallest footprints being taken in the urban jungle with not only retrofits of existing hotels but a huge surge in green sourcing of everything from locally grown food to bamboo-blend sheets. You've been hearing a lot about LEED, The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and more specifically their Green Building Rating System, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council. Besides loving acronyms almost as much as we do LEED and the USGBC developed a suite of standards for environmentally sustainable construction in the late 90's and have grown to more than 14,000 projects in the US and over 30 countries worldwide.

For the second year in a row Travel and Leisure names Virgina America the country's best domestic airline. As a fan of Virgin America since they started, I was pleased to see them recognized by T+L (although I was really surprised that Alaska Airlines made the top ten). Here are some of the things that I really like about Virgina America:

I have to be honest, I am in love with Tripadvisor.  Obviously I use it when I hear about a new hotel that I haven't heard of (AKA how it's supposed to be used) but I also use it when I'm in a bad mood or need a laugh or just want to play "guess what country the reviewer is from."  Where else can you find three headlines for the same hotel like "BEST LOCATION EVER," "grate servse but horrible location" and "stolen wallet."  Obviously beauty is in the eye of the beholder.