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The Maverick Hotelier Behind Dar Ahlam Doubles Down On Luxe Regenerative Travel
15.04.2024 - 10:29 / forbes.com
The way people usually travel is all wrong, says visionary hotelier Thierry Teyssier. And for more than two decades, he’s been showing them how to do it better. His latest venture, 700,000 Heures Impact, is spreading to a new continent—and proving that regenerative travel doesn’t have to be lectures and compromises but can instead be real encounters and comforts.
Teyssier opened the multi-award-winning Dar Ahlam hotel in the Moroccan desert near Ouarzazate 22 years ago—long before anyone was telling tourists to “travel deeper,” before buzzwords like “transformative” and “regenerative” entered the lexicon. He was ahead of his time, opening a hotel so far from tourist centers and doing away with “standard” features like televisions.
“People need to go to remote places,” he says, “You will enjoy Marrakech. But you won’t learn anything about Morocco.”
He followed Dar Ahlam with the Memory Road, a discreetly luxurious nomadic journey in the footsteps of the “free men” who traversed southern Morocco. That expanded into 700,000 Heures—“hours” in English, the length of an average human lifespan—a series of pop-up hotels and highly curated small group trips that he led himself.
Since then, he’s grown more committed to regenerative travel—the idea that “hospitality brings life into a place”—and set about creating lasting impacts rather than dependencies on traditional tourism jobs. To that end, he partnered with Diane Binder, the founder of Regenopolis, an initiative that supports local sustainability efforts.
His 700,000 Heures became 700,000 Heures Impact, and last week they announced that their first permanent outpost, in the ancient Moroccan village of Tizkmoudine, would soon be joined by a microlodge in the Peruvian Amazon. The intimate properties likes at the intersection of the rain forest and the cloud forest, giving it access to diverse ecosystems.
It’s a hush-hush experience, capped at just 50 guests per season. They get access only after they become members of a sort of club by donating Teyssier’s nonprofit, which funds regenerative projects around his destinations.
Here are highlights from an edited interview in which he explains his vision.
During the last six years, I opened pop-ups in Cambodia, Brazil, Japan, Italy, France and Morocco. Every time, it was also a project to work with communities. And I wanted to prove that hospitality is not a question of walls or a roof. It's a feeling, a way to welcome you.
I wanted to create something different. Instead of spending energy to convince new guests to come to my main hotels, I had clients who wanted to discover the world. And I said, Well, maybe I could create a club of all these people and we could travel together.
It was a huge success. Everything
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