Butterfield & Robinson’s Dalmation Coast Active trip in Croatia

Mike Scarola is the CEO of Butterfield & Robinson, a luxury travel company with the goal of making a positive impact. He speaks to LUX about connecting with local communities and travelling on two wheels instead of four

LUX: What was the inspiration behind your Slow Find initiative?
Mike Scarola: The Slow Fund is driven by our passion for sustainability, focusing on education, culture, conservation, and preservation. We needed a formal vehicle to give back, which is essentially the genesis of the Slow Fund. Sustainable travel has been in our DNA since the beginning, just by the nature of what we do.

Seeing the world or seeing a region on bikes or on foot, we believe is a better, more sustainable way to travel. Currently we support nine initiatives globally, which range from conserving species and iconic landscapes across Africa, to supporting gender equality in the safari industry, to our art residency in France. The ideas behind the initiatives we choose to support typically come from our guides or our planners, because they know the region and its needs the best. We always aim to support sustainability efforts or cultural initiatives in the regions where we take travellers, and often try to bring our travellers into some of those initiatives while they’re on trip. This allows them to give back to the communities they visit and understand the essence of Slow Travel.

Pizza making lessons from a local chef in Italy on the Amalfi Coast Walking tour

LUX: When you first brought in this idea of sustainable travel and travelling on bicycle rather than taking cars, was there a high client demand for it, or was it something that you had to intensively market?
MS: The long story is that our founder, George Butterfield, is an unbelievable trailblazer. He had a huge passion for travel and bringing people to new experiences. He was always trying new trips,  and in the early 70s he decided to try biking and as a part of a travel experience. But first time round, it just didn’t catch on.

Then he had someone in his office who, in the early 80s, started to make a case that we should try this again. He thought that people that are looking for luxury will also want to bike through Europe. George was actually pretty hesitant at the time, but they tried it and it absolutely took off in the early 80s.

LUX: How do you go about tracking your carbon footprint and why do you think it’s important that companies, especially travel companies, need to be doing this?
MS: We’re in our second year of very detailed tracking of our carbon footprint, and the reason we do this is because we want create a positive impact in the world. There’s a real crisis and we’re part of it, but we’re now trying to be part of the solution. The first step that we thought was important was to try to measure our impact. It’s tough, but once you measure that, you can communicate the biggest impacts of what your company has day-to-day on the environment, and then you can start to take solid steps to reduce it. We’ve always thought about the environment and taken steps to improve our trips and reduce our carbon footprint, but this formalisation allows us to track it on an annual basis.

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LUX: What’s the philosophy behind your travel experiences?
MS: We think there is a large number of travellers who want to be active when they go on vacation, and who will get a better experience seeing a region on two wheels than they will on four. There’s so many regions now that are wonderful to hike through, to bike through, to canoe through, that also have luxury accommodations, which is often really important for us. We always try to bring our travellers to luxury accommodations, to high end food.

Mike Scarola on the Tuscany Wine Country Biking tour in Italy

LUX: You do a lot of community-based work trying to enhance their lives whilst travellers come and visit. How do you ensure a community focused approach while also balancing client demand?
MS: What we find is that travellers are looking for very authentic experiences. They’re not only looking to stay in the nicest hotel and eat the best meals. They’re looking to feel like they’ve come away with a connection and a deeper understanding of the region, which lines up really well with what we try to do. We try to source from locally-owned businesses and local people to help deliver experiences on the trip. So whether it’s a specialised tour, or  stopping in the middle of your cycle for lunch in a restaurant owner’s backyard, where they’re going to teach you how to make pasta, these are the types of authentic experiences that our travellers are looking for. We work really hard on a day-to-day basis to try to find them and it’s only possible because of the network we have built up . We have about 125 guides that are located around the world, who know their regions intimately and are often the source of new experiences with locals.

LUX: Can you tell us more about your art residency initiative in France?
MS: Certainly. This a partnership with a former guide, who has an art residency program in France. They came to us to say that they often identify fantastic artists who are very much in need of financial aid, who could use our help. That’s all we really needed to know. A passion of ours is being about to support our guides, and to support art and culture. We’ve sponsored a number of artists. The latest one is a Belarussian artist, who had to leave their home country because of what’s happening over in Ukraine. This was a phenomenal artist who really didn’t have anything, and was going to have to give up their passion and give up their talent in order just to survive. So we helped to support.

LUX: What sets Butterfield and Robinson apart from other travel companies in the industry?
MS: The heart and soul of this business are our guides and our experienced designers. I would argue at the end of the day that we have the best guides and the best experienced designers on the planet.

Read more: Travelling Botswana on Eco-Safari, Review

Mike Scarola guiding on the Tuscany Wine Country Biking tour in Italy

We always have a get together, a guide kick off at the beginning of the European season in April, and a guide gathering at the end of the European season. They are the most creative, well-travelled individuals who speak multiple languages with stories from the whole year on how they took travellers to amazing spots. We ask our travellers at the end of the trip to rate us on a whole bunch of different metrics, and the guide score is always the highest and most consistent, because they’re so knowledgeable about the region.

LUX: How do you aspire to continue redefining luxury travel in the years to come?
MS: The biggest thing for me is listening to our travellers. Our travellers have been the best source of direction over the last 57 years, and I think they’re going to continue to be. I think the demand for authentic experiences will continue to grow. The other thing is that travellers are looking to have a bit of an impact on their trips as well. I can see us doing it a lot more where they’re not just visiting and learning, but they’re participating, potentially in a project that they do on a trip that you know makes them feel a little more connected, a little more empathy for the region and the culture.

Find out more: www.butterfield.com

A monkey runs across the private pool terrace of the Royal ‘Burra Sahib’ Suite at Sher Bagh. Image by James Houston

Why should I go now?

Thanks to  stricter wildlife policies, India’s population of endangered Bengal tigers has increased by 33 percent since 2014, and with 60 tigers roaming 500-square-miles of wilderness, Ranthambore National Park remains the best place to see them.

The park was once the private hunting ground of the Maharajas of Jaipur, and is still home to many ruins of hunting lodges as well as a majestic crumbling fort from the 10th century. The landscape itself is varied with everything from dense jungle to open plains and desert-like areas; each safari jeep is assigned an area on arrival to prevent overcrowding and limit the impact on the habitat.

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The park tends to be quieter at this time of year, making the safari experience especially peaceful and whilst seeing a wild tiger is never guaranteed, it helps to have a knowledgeable guide. SUJÁN Sher Bagh is known to have not just the best guides and trackers, but the luxury group is also committed to conservation, meaning that every guest who stays at the camp is contributing to the group’s philanthropic initiatives.

Sher Bagh’s swimming pool overlooks the wild grasslands. Image by James Houston

What’s the lowdown?

Sher Bagh is a luxury tented camp pitched under a canopy of indigenous trees on the fringes of Ranthambore National Park. There are only 12 tents with the majority arranged in a semi-circle and the royal suite secluded behind mud walls, giving the whole place an intimate, homely atmosphere, emphasised by the warmth of the staff. The place is designed to evoke the romance of old-world travel with wood panelled floors, leather furnishings, vintage trunks, crystal decanters of whiskey and golden oil lamps that light the pathways and hang from the branches come nightfall. The staff are mainly all from the local villages, and everything from the tents to the interior decorations and even the smooth mud surfaces of the pathways are created by local craftspeople, whilst the kitchen uses ingredients grown in the gardens and cultivated on the camp’s farm.

Image by James Houston

Sher Bagh’s staff hang lamps on the trees at every dusk, creating a magical ‘fairy-tale’ atmosphere. Image by James Houston

Breakfast and lunch are generally served in the beautiful grand dining tent with a menu of delicious Anglo-Indian dishes, whilst dinner is traditional Indian cuisine served in a surprise location each evening. The thali and the buttery flaked parathas were amongst the best we’ve ever tasted, and we also loved the selection of canapés served with pre-drinks round the fire every evening, but the bespoke dining experiences were the real highlight. After a morning game drive, our jeep pulled up into the farm yard where a decadent breakfast buffet was laid out underneath the shade of a tree. Before eating, we were given the opportunity to try milking one of the cows and collect eggs from the henhouse, which were then cooked by the chef with fresh herbs and spices. On our final night, we arrived back at our tent to find a table set up on our private pool terrace, surround by hundreds of glowing lanterns.

Breakfast and lunch are generally served in the main dining tent (above), but bespoke experiences can also be arranged. Below: breakfast served on the camp’s farm after an early morning safari. Images by James Houston

The park’s animals naturally wander into the surroundings areas. This is especially the case with the monkeys who, during our stay, swung between the branches overhead, played on the roof of our tent and drank from our pool. In the mornings, the camp naturalist showed us the tracks and trip-camera images of nighttime visitors to the farm, including a leopard, sloth bear and hyena. Understandably guides are required to accompany guests back to the tents after dark, but the real magic of the place comes from not knowing what you might encounter, who might be peeping at you through the branches or sharing the same pathways.

Read more: The must-visit destinations of 2020 by Geoffrey Kent

Indeed, most guests come to Sher Bagh for the wildlife experiences. The camp’s luxury 4×4 vehicles depart for safaris every morning and afternoon, with stops halfway through for drinks and snacks in the jungle. Whilst tigers are the main draw, the park is also home to leopards, sloth bears, deer, mongoose, wild boars, hyenas, jackals, crocodiles and an array of tropical birds. For us, one of the most beautiful experiences was watching the monkeys walking amongst the villagers on their way to morning worship. In between drives, the camp is a very peaceful place to relax, swimming, reading or listening to the hum of the jungle.

Getting horiztonal

We stayed in the largest and most luxurious tent: the Royal ‘Burra Sahib’ Suite. Enclosed behind  mud walls, the tent is the most secluded area of the camp with its own private heated swimming pool overlooking the grasslands. The interiors follow the camp’s colonial theme with cream linens, and rosewood and teak furnishings, including a beautiful four-poster bed and two open wardrobes each equipped with a branded safari fleece (the morning drives can be very chilly). There’s a separate sitting room with a curated selection of books, and a spacious bathroom, featuring natural, sustainable bath products. Laundry and ironing are complimentary and the suite comes with a high-tech DSLR camera for guests to borrow on safaris.

Most of the tents are arranged in a semi circle (above), whilst the Royal ‘Burra Sahib’ Suite is secluded behind mud walls (below). Images by James Houston

Flipside

Sher Bagh manages to balance the highest level of luxury with authenticity and honesty. Sustainable practices are integrated into every element of the camp from the homegrown ingredients to the local staff and use of natural materials. The air conditioning units in the rooms and communal areas are the only contradiction to this ethos that we noticed, and although it’s understandably necessary to keep the rooms cool during the hotter months, it seems a shame that these can’t be replaced with a more environmentally friendly option.

Rates: From ₹55,000 for a luxury tent including all meals (approx. £600/€700/ $750)

Book your stay: thesujanlife.com/sher-bagh

Millie Walton

Argentina is one of Geoffrey Kent’s must-visit destinations for 2020. Image by Jonatan Lewczuk

LUX columnist and Abercrombie & Kent founder Geoffrey Kent reveals his hottest destinations for the new year plus top tips of what to see and do

Egypt

Egypt has an enduring appeal with its mesmeric relics, atmospheric souks, and natural wonders. After the tumult of recent years, the Land of the Pharaohs is making a deserved comeback. In 2018, more than 11 million tourists visited Egypt, and the World Tourism Organisation has since named the country the world’s fastest-growing travel destination. In the latter half of 2020, the Grand Egyptian Museum is finally set to open. Encompassing 500,000 square metres, this vast exhibition space will showcase an omnium-gatherum of Ancient Egyptian finds – 30,000 of which have never been exhibited in public before.

My top tip: Egypt is a place where it’s imperative to have an experienced local guide so that you can truly appreciate this ancient civilisation’s history and culture.

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‘Egypt has an enduring appeal with its mesmeric relics, atmospheric souks, and natural wonders’

Sri Lanka

The ‘teardrop of India’ brims with lush landscapes, ancient treasures, and rich cultural heritage. Successive waves of Indian, Arab and European traders flocked to Sri Lanka’s palm-fringed shores, attracted by rare spices, precious stones, and magnificent elephants. Today ancient cities, tea plantations, and hill stations vie travellers’ attentions, alongside eight UNESCO World Heritage sites, great beaches and national parks with an abundance of wildlife. On a Sri Lanka holiday, a large dose of tropical warmth awaits, in both the weather and the welcome.

My top tip: Sri Lanka is home to the biggest leopards that I have seen anywhere – be sure to spend time in Yala National Park, where dozens of these magnificent cats live.

Geoffrey Kent recommends visiting Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park to see leopards

Argentina

There are few places in the world where you can feel the same sense of vastness and isolation that you can find in Argentina’s breathtakingly rugged landscapes. Voyage to Argentina in 2020 to experience one of nature’s most magnificent events: a total solar eclipse. Set to take place on 14 December, this aligning of celestial bodies will be visible from just a few South American countries. In Argentina, the event will briefly plunge northern Patagonia into darkness in the middle of the afternoon. Be among the few to witness this rare, magical moment in a region already famed for its spectacular scenery.

My top tip: If you go this year, you can become one of the first guests to stay at the explora Patagonia Argentina, the latest in the hotel group’s roster of exemplary eco-lodges.

Read more: An evening of contemporary art and fine dining with Gaggenau

Nahuel Huapi, a large glacial lake surrounded by the Andes Mountains in Argentina

Laos

Until recently, Laos was in the shadow of its more famous Indochinese neighbours. It has often been overlooked by travellers considering a visit to South-East Asia. This country’s charm and authenticity are drawing a growing number of visitors to its lesser-travelled trails, however, and we expect the trend to continue in 2020. Step back in time as you explore this nation of jungles, temples, hill-top villages, and ancient relics for yourself, free of the frantic pace of so many other Asian cities.

My top tip: Go in the forthcoming year to discover the Plain of Jars for yourself. Stretching across the Xiangkhoang Plateau, this vast archaeological site features thousands of enormous stone vessels, scattered by a past civilisation whose culture remains a mystery. While folklore suggests the jars belonged to giants, further excavations in 2019 point instead towards a more anthropological answer: that this was once a burial ground. Visit this hard-to-reach UNESCO World Heritage Site by flying in via helicopter, accompanied by an expert guide.

Geoffrey Kent predicts Laos will grow in popularity as a travel destination in 2020

Ethiopia

Ethiopia is one of Africa’s most enthralling – and often overlooked – destinations. Following on from an incredible trip there in late 2019 – one of my Inspiring Expeditions – it easily earns its spot on my list for this year. I can recommend thoroughly. Situated in the Horn of Africa, it’s a land of dramatic contrasts – stunning lakes and mountain ranges as well as the Blue Nile. It is home to strikingly diverse and beautiful people such as the Kara, the Hamar, Mursi, and Nyangatom to name but a few – proudly independent, who have never been subjugated in modern times. The rock-hewn churches of Lalibela offer historical intrigue, while the other-worldly Danakil Depression and wildlife of the Simien and Bale Mountains are a major draw for nature lovers. Whether in the bustling cities or remote highlights, you’ll find an abundance of history, tradition, and goodwill.

My top tip: Visit during the annual Irreecha thanksgiving festival of the Oromo people in Addis Ababa. Witness freshly cut grass and flowers being placed in water – a traditional offering that thanks God for the end of the rainy season and the start of spring. It’s a fantastic opportunity for immersion in this aspect of the country’s culture.

Ethiopia is one of Africa’s most enthralling – and often overlooked – destinations, says Geoffrey Kent

The Arctic

Celebrate the audacity of exploration on an extraordinary cruise through the rarely traversed Northwest Passage. In 2020, A&K’s Ultimate Iceland & Greenland luxury expedition cruise will be led by a modern explorer, famed mountaineer Alex Pancoe, who just completed the Explorers Grand Slam, an adventurers’ challenge consisting of climbing the seven summits—the highest mountains on each continent—as well as cross-country skiing the final degree to the North and South Poles. Accompanied by Pancoe, voyage from western Greenland to Nome Alaska. Following in the footsteps of Leif Erikson (Erik the Red), who founded the Viking colony in Greenland and ventured to Newfoundland a full 500 years before Columbus, and coming in the wake of more recent great explorers such as Roald Amundsen and Robert McClure.

My top tip: an exceptional expedition crew and luxurious ship make all the difference when travelling to the poles.

Geoffrey Kent cruising the Arctic Ocean

Find out more: abercrombiekent.co.uk