Live From ILTM: How Nayara Is Solving Tourism’s Hidden Housing Crisis

Nayara Resorts is confronting one of tourism’s most overlooked problems—the housing crisis that forces local workers out of their communities in remote areas—by building homes for its most vulnerable employees.

In this ILTM episode, recorded live in Cannes, Leo Ghitis, CEO of Nayara Resorts, joins Afar editor in chief Julia Cosgrove to discuss how the luxury resort group is addressing both environmental devastation and social inequality in Latin America’s rural communities.

Leo shares Nayara’s 15-year evolution from “improvising” regenerative travel to implementing a 10-year strategic plan with environmental consultants. The results include planting 40,000 trees to restore a barren mountain in Costa Rica, creating the only carbon-neutral luxury hotel in Chile, and operating a 100 percent off-grid island resort in Panama powered entirely by solar energy.

But it’s Nayara’s housing project that represents its most ambitious social initiative—subdividing land near its Costa Rica properties to provide subsidized lots and mortgages to female-headed households, with no requirement that recipients continue working at the resort.

As Leo explains, meaningful luxury today isn’t about escaping the world but engaging with it in a safe, sensitive way—and younger travelers increasingly choose hotels based on their positive impact rather than their amenities.

Transcript

Julia Cosgrove: I’m Julia Cosgrove, vice president and editor in chief of Afar. And welcome to View from Afar, a podcast that spotlights the people and the ideas shaping the future of travel. In this special series, I’m coming to you live from ILTM, one of the most important travel shows that happens every year. ILTM stands for the International Luxury Travel Market, and the show takes place in a fittingly luxurious city, Cannes, France. The conversations that happen here influence how we think about travel for years to come. Afar cofounder Joe Diaz and I sat down with leaders across the travel industry, from visionary hoteliers to destination innovators, to discuss the trends, challenges and ideas that are driving hospitality forward.

This is our last View from Afar episode from ILTM Cannes, and we’re ending on a note that is especially meaningful to me and to Afar. I’m talking to Leo Geddes, founder and owner of Nayara Resorts. Leo has built one of the most admired hospitality brands in Central and South America, with lodges in Costa Rica, Panama and Chile that are as much about sustainability as they are luxury. His hospitality projects have included large-scale efforts that have restored native rainforest habitats and wildlife, including the sloths that now live in Nayara’s rainforest canopy in Costa Rica. He’s also launched community programs that provide housing and jobs to women near his resorts.

At Afar, we’ve always covered values-driven companies and championed sustainable travel brands like Nayara, so much so that we spent the past several years working towards becoming a certified B Corporation. Late last month, we got word that we had been certified. We’ll be sharing more on a future podcast about why we chose to join this global movement of businesses balancing purpose and profit, and what that means for the future of our company. For now, please enjoy this moving conversation with Leo, who shares how he approaches environmental stewardship and social impact and what’s next for him and Nayara.

Well welcome, Leo. Here we are at ILTM Cannes. It’s a little bit of a cloudy day here, but we got some sun yesterday. We’re so happy to have you in studio with us today.

Leo Geddes: Well, Julia, thank you. You know, I’m a huge fan of Afar. So very, very excited and very honored to be here.

Julia: Thank you. Well, we’ll get right into it. I had the pleasure of visiting one of your properties, Nayara, in Costa Rica in 2023, and felt this very deeply that the property has this very deep connection to nature and the space surrounding the property. Sustainability has become a bit of a buzzword. How do you make sure that the approach you take with Nayara continues to have a big and a real impact? And how has that evolved over the years?

Leo: Julia, thank you for asking that question. That’s something that is very important for us. It’s kind of the reason why we started Nayara. When we started 15 years ago, in all candor, we did not know what we were doing. We wanted to be sustainable. We wanted to go beyond sustainability towards regenerative travel. And we were improvising.

So 15 years ago, we were probably one of the first hotels in the world to eliminate plastics. Then we decided to use hot springs to reduce electricity. We decided that we didn’t want to use chemicals to treat our wastewater, so we use biodigesters. But the needs are just huge. The responsibility is awesome, and we realized that we needed to do it in a better way and the best decision we made. And it’s the same recommendation that I make to all my fellow hoteliers. We hired a consulting firm that specializes in environmental stewardship and what they did for us, which has been wonderful.

They put together a ten-year strategic plan, and they told us, this is what you should be doing over time. And we have goals every year of what we need to accomplish. And they come to us every year. They review what we have accomplished and they tell us if we were successful, what we should be doing differently. So I would say that not 100 percent because of them, but with their help, we’ve been able to undertake more important projects.

You were in a tented camp a few years ago, so you know that that was a mountain that had been totally, totally devastated by cattle ranchers. And then it became a milk processing plant, and they had basically destroyed absolutely everything. We made the decision that we wanted to bring back the rainforest. That was a very, very big project for us. It took 10 years and we planted over 40,000 trees, which you had an opportunity to see. And what’s incredibly rewarding for us, when we bought that little mountain, there was zero wildlife. There was nothing. There was not even grass. I never understood how the cows could survive on that mountain.

Now, I cannot say that we have a mature rainforest, but we’re getting there. And probably the most important part is that now we have a healthy ecosystem. We’re full of birds, we have monkeys, we have sloths. None of that existed. We also, with their help, designed an island on the Caribbean coast in Panama, which is one hundred percent off grid. We generate our own power using solar panels. We collect rainwater, which we purify for water consumption. In the Atacama Desert, we have a hotel in the only oasis in the Atacama Desert, and the government does not provide utilities there. So when we got involved, there was a huge diesel plant that threw in the atmosphere, if I remember correctly, almost two tons of carbon. We’re very proud that we have decommissioned that generator and now we use solar panels. We went from two tons of carbon to three hundred kilograms this year. Next year we’re going to be zero. All of our properties in Costa Rica are carbon neutral. Our property in Panama just got what’s called the S-certification—it is the highest ecological certification that the government of Chile provides. And I believe we’re the only luxury hotel in all of Chile.

Julia: Congratulations. That’s admirable. And you’ve got the 10 year project keeping you honest and holding you accountable.

Leo: Absolutely, absolutely. And again, I recommend to anybody that cares about this to do the same. I mean, this is too important for you to improvise.

Julia: Yeah I mean, the reforestation efforts, the rewilding efforts. One other piece I thought was just amazing when I visited was what you were doing for the local communities and specifically women in the community. So I’d love to hear a little bit about that.

Leo: That’s one of the most important things that we do, and it’s kind of the reason why we are in this business. Let me start with something that is very, very close to my heart. All of our resorts are located in rural areas, and one really big issue in rural areas is that there are not a lot of jobs. And what happens is that a lot of people—and this happens where we operate our resorts. But I think it happens all over the world.

And what happens is that people go to the cities in search for work. And in most cases, unfortunately and very sadly, people that go to the cities end up… I don’t want to use the word slums, but that’s kind of what happens. They end up in the least desirable areas in those big cities, in those big urban centers, and they become very vulnerable, very susceptible to crime. And I’ve met so many people over the years, people that work with us, that tell me, you know, my father went to the city looking for work and he never came back. We grew up without fathers. And that happens more often than you can believe.

What we do in these rural areas is we give priority to hire people from the local communities, and we believe that working in a hotel is not something that you do on a temporary basis. Unfortunately, many hotels, because our business is so seasonal, hire people on a temporary basis. We’ve never done that. We never will. Our jobs are full-time jobs and we believe in creating opportunities for people to grow personally and professionally. And the idea is that working at our hotels is an opportunity for people to grow. We provide well-paying jobs and lots of opportunities.

I did not answer your question, which I’m going to do now.

I don’t like to say anything bad about any company in our space, but something that has happened—the downside of tourism—is that in many remote locations, people that own apartments and homes, little houses that they rent to the people that work in those communities, the owners of these houses and apartments no longer want to rent them to the locals, because they make much more money doing short-term rentals. I mean, likeAirbnb. And in many, many rural areas, there’s a real housing crisis as a result of that.

We realized that that was happening, especially where we are in Costa Rica, and a lot of people that work with us were getting evicted from their homes because the owners wanted them out so that they could do things like Airbnb. Something that we realized is that we just couldn’t fix this problem piecemeal. So a project that we’re doing that is probably one of the most exciting things we are doing: we bought a large piece of property close to the hotel. It’s a big parcel. We’re subdividing it, bringing water and sewer, and we are going to provide these lots to the people who are in most need at our hotels in Costa Rica.

It is incredibly sad that the people who are the most vulnerable, the people who are most in need, are women that in many cases have been abandoned by boyfriends or husbands. They have children. And in many, you know, even though I just said that we pay well-paying jobs, they still struggle as much as we try that not to happen. And so what we’re doing is we’re allocating these lots to the people who have the greatest need, who happen to be those women. And we have also teamed up with a local bank in Costa Rica. And we told the bank, this is not a for-profit venture. This is a social project. So they are providing subsidized mortgages. The most important part about what we’re doing—this is not a retention tool. And these mostly women that are moving into the community know that once they sign the dotted line, they can quit the following day. I mean, it’s their home for life, right?

Julia: There’s no stipulation that they need to stay at Nayara and continue.

Leo: And I’ll tell you what is tremendously rewarding for me: in many cases, in situations where you have a woman head of household, the children grow up by themselves. And again, those children are at risk. The idea is that the children in this community are going to grow up together, and hopefully I think they will be much safer because of that.

Our idea is this community took us a long time to launch it because in Costa Rica, it’s very difficult to develop anything because the environmental laws are very stringent. But now we started construction finally, and the idea is that once we do this, we will continue doing it so that we can provide housing to people who are really in need.

The reason why I like to talk about it—and I’m very thankful that you asked me this question because you have a huge megaphone that we don’t have—I believe I sincerely believe that most, not only hoteliers, most business people have the ability to do what we’re doing. We are too small to be able to make a difference. But I think together, business people around the world, we can do it and we can really alleviate this housing crisis that is so prevalent in rural areas.

Julia: Shifting gears a little bit, guests often describe Nayara as both incredibly luxurious and close to nature. How do you design for that? And tell me a little bit about maybe the little creatures that you might sometimes find skittering across your floor in the tent.

Leo: It’s a very interesting question that you ask, and I wish I could take credit and say that we designed these masterpieces that combine nature and luxury and comfort. It is kind of an accident.

I’ll give you an example. When we did this big reforestation, we had this mountain all of a sudden that had a rainforest. And we started thinking, what shall we do here? And we decided to build our tented camp in the middle of this forest. What happens—and you saw it—because there’s so much wildlife, our guests staying in the tents, all you have to do is open your window and you see all kinds of birds, monkeys, sloths. And we are also very, very lucky in Costa Rica. All of our hotels overlook this active or semi-active volcano, the Arenal Volcano.

Something that we did is we bring the hot springs from the Arenal Volcano mostly via gravity. Sometimes we can’t when it doesn’t rain. So especially in Nayara Springs and Tented Camp, you step outside your balcony and you have a plunge pool fed by hot springs. Hot springs that flow from the Arenal Volcano twenty-four seven.

In Panama, we just finished a spa that sits fifty feet over the jungle canopy. In Atacama, Atacama is one of the driest deserts in the world—drier than the Sahara Desert. And one of the advantages of such a dry climate is that it’s ideal for stargazing, and that’s why you find a lot of the most important observatories around the world located in the Atacama Desert.

What we did: we created our own observatory, so we have an open-air observatory in the hotel. We have a guide that is a quasi-astronomer. So we help guests understand what they’re seeing in the sky. So we take advantage of the amazing nature that surrounds all of our hotels.

Julia: The nature is the luxury in many ways. So you’ve expanded from the Costa Rica properties into Panama and Chile, and I know you’ve got more in the pipeline. What guides your choice of the next location and, flip side, how do you ensure that you’re preserving the ethos of Nayara as the portfolio grows?

Leo: Another very good and tough question to answer. It’s one of the most difficult decisions that we make. We are very, very fortunate that we have lots of opportunities. We look for places of extraordinary natural beauty, cultural history, anthropological richness, and that’s how we end up in all of these locations where we are.

In terms of how we preserve our ethos, I think it has to do with our relationship with the communities where we operate. Part of our philosophy, and we’re very, very strict about this, whenever possible, we procure everything from the local community. But the idea for us is not only to help the people that work with us, but also to raise the standard of living in the communities where we operate. Most of the communities where we are are not well off because they tend to be a little remote. For us, it’s a partnership with the communities where we are, and they see us as a force for good.

Julia: Yeah. And you feel that as a guest. All right. So this is going to get a little philosophical, which we both love. What does meaningful luxury look like to you now? And how do you think sort of the next generation of travelers are coming up? How do you think they’re changing that, if they are at all? What does meaningful luxury look like?

Leo: It’s interesting. I perceive how travelers have changed. I remember the days when luxury travel meant extravagance and hedonistic luxury. Luckily, things are changing and I see it very, very much with the guests that come to our resorts. I try to speak with guests when I’m at the property, and what they mention to me is they’re looking to connect. They’re looking to connect with nature, with place. They want to learn about the history and about every location where they go. They actually want to connect with themselves.

Julia: Yeah.

Leo: I guess another way of saying it: guest travelers do not want to escape from the world. They want to engage with the world, but in a safe, sensitive way. And I love to speak with the people that work in our reservations department. And I always ask them, when guests call you, what questions do they have? And you would expect guests to ask, what’s the rate, what’s included? But that’s not what they ask.

They want to know what each one of our resorts is doing to improve the world. And that happens especially with the younger generation. It’s interesting, they come to our resorts because of Afar and other publications. It’s known what we’re doing for communities, for the environment. And guests want to be part of that story. I always tell my fellow hoteliers, I mean, nowadays, Julia, everybody is great. I mean, the amount of greenwashing is crazy. But I tell people, don’t just talk about it. Do it. And even if you don’t fully believe it, do it because it’s good for business. Because the new generation is looking for that.

Julia: Yeah. And travelers sort of demand travel to be a force for good. Luckily, that’s exactly what we both do. So, Leo, believe it or not, we’re at the end of our time here. I wish you a great conference, and thank you so much for sitting in studio with Afar today.

Leo: And Julia, I want to thank you for everything that you do. I’m a big fan of your magazine and you are. I think Afar is a force for good. So thank you again for everything you do.

Julia: Thank you. Thanks for joining us for this special episode of View From Afar, recorded live at ILTM in Cannes. In the show notes, you’ll find links to everything we discussed today, as well as Nayara’s website and social media handles and Afar’s recent coverage of the company. You can find more View From Afar on Afar.com and be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok. We are @AfarMedia.

If you enjoyed today’s exploration, I hope you’ll come back for more great interviews. Subscribing always makes that easy. And be sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platforms. It helps other travelers find it.

This has been View From Afar, a production of Afar Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene and Nikki Galteland with assistance from Jenn Flowers, Julia Cosgrove and Joe Diaz. Music composition from Epidemic Sound.

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