Held at at London’s ExCeL Centre and having concluded this year on 11 November, the World Travel Market (WTM) is a premier, global travel event, the goal of which is to allow industry professionals to explore the latest travel trends, conduct business and network. With specific focus on Responsible Tourism, the event therefore offered the WHL Group an ideal opportunity once again to spread the word about its network of local connections.

On Monday 6 August, The International Ecotourism Society (TIES) announced the 16 finalists (five individuals and 11 organisations) of the 2010 TIES Innovation Leadership in Sustainable Tourism Awards. The WHL Group is pleased to learn that one of its subsidiary companies, WHL Consulting, has been selected as a 2010 Innovation Award finalist for creation of the Tourism Development Bank.

Despite its successes, WHL Consulting believes that it will not be possible to continue its mission as a sustainable development organisation without addressing the key business constraint of access to finance by small businesses. So they came up with their own innovative financing tool: the Tourism Development Bank.

Most of us readily to acknowledge – sometimes perhaps a little too quietly – the impact we make on host destinations when we travel. The most conscientious of us do our best to minimise our impact or make it a positive one, but there’s no question that, by traveling, we are part of something that creates change….

The effect is stunning. For armchair explorers it’s about as close to a live visual experience of a place as one can get. Immersive spherical panoramic photography, sometimes called VR (virtual reality) photography, practically puts the viewer in the place of the photographer, the latter having taken multiple digital photos of a place, covering it…

Brazil is already gearing up for two major international events: the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. The country’s tourism infrastructure is however not keeping pace. Redressing some of these market concerns is an innovative program, called Project:Exposure, sponsored by the Multilateral Investments Fund (MIF), a fund administrated by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

The ‘begats’ are almost biblical. In the beginning there was www.worldhotel-link.com, a development project of the International Finance Corporation (IFC). In 2006, it begat whl.travel, a private business that is now a global online travel-booking franchise network of local tourism companies in nearly 300 destinations. In July 2009, it then begat the WHL Group.