Bright Ideas in Travel 2024

07.11.2024 - 11:23 / cntraveler.com

Our Bright Ideas in Travel list, first launched in 2022, recognizes the players, places, and projects that are approaching travel’s most pressing issues with thoughtfulness and zeal. In our third iteration of this franchise, we've selected trailblazers who have demonstrated a positive impact on the travel industry in 2024 or celebrated a significant milestone in their efforts to prove how travel can move our world forward. Their unique and pioneering approaches straddle the realms of sustainability, community, inclusion, accessibility, conservation, innovation, innovation, and wellness (a category we've added for the first time this year).

Some of the honorees on the 2024 Bright Ideas in Travel list are making a point of thinking big: managing a worldwide wildlife census, creating an open-source map with hundreds of thousands of users, even creating trails and bike paths that span an entire country (or eight). But more focused projects can have just as powerful an impact when they direct their attention to the needs of a community—or the experiences of individual travelers. This year's honorees range from countries, airlines, and tech giants to startups, small nonprofits, and even a handful of operations that started out as one-person shows. Needless to say, a bright idea can look like a lot of things—and we’re excited to celebrate all of them.

This year’s list is more expansive than ever, with 71 innovators touching every US state (plus Washington, DC) and more than 75 countries across every continent (yes, even a few in Antarctica). It’s also more relevant than ever: These bright ideas—around slow and low-carbon travel, citizen science that assists conservation and climate research, and community-driven tourism strategies to ensure locals are helped, not hurt, by international travel—show us the industry’s potential as a force for good when we invest in people and the planet.

Read more about the Future of Travel here.

SWISS plans to be the first airline in the world to fly with solar kerosene, a carbon-neutral fuel made using sunlight.

In June 2024, Switzerland-based Synhelion opened the world’s first demonstration plant for the production of solar fuel: a carbon-neutral fuel made using sunlight that can be swapped in directly for fossil fuels to reduce carbon emissions by more than 80%, says the company. The plant, located in Germany, is fully operational and the first commercial plant is projected to open in 2027 with the goal of producing 1 million tons of solar fuel annually by 2033. These big plans have been made possible, in part, by the aviation industry. SWISS and its parent company, the Lufthansa Group, partnered with Synhelion in 2020 to help bring this fuel to market. In fact, SWISS plans