Adventure Collection

A conversation with Sven Lindblad, founder and president of Lindblad Expeditions.

DG: How did you get involved in the adventure travel business in the first place? 

SL: In 1970 I went to East Africa for a summer -- and stayed for 6 years. Near the end of that stay, my father came and visited me in my camp where I was studying elephants and asked if I would come back and work for him. I was delighted and honored to do that – he was my hero – and so I came back. I worked for him for a year and a half, and discovered that fathers and sons should perhaps have a bit more distance. But I was intrigued with the ability to connect appreciation of the wild or conservation with travel, and I suggested starting an offshoot company called Special Expeditions, and that started in July of 1979. 

Lindblad Travel – my father’s company – began in 1958. Special Expeditions began as a division of Lindblad and then became independent in 1983. 

What was the mission or focus of Special Expeditions at the beginning? 

It really was glomming on to some of the core values of what Lindblad Travel was. At that time Lindblad Travel’s energy was being consumed by the development of China. My father had been asked to come in and open up China, and I really felt that a lot of the other stuff that we were used to doing as a company wasn’t getting the attention it needed any more. So it was really protecting the old rather than starting something particularly new.   

What kinds of trips were you offering? 

The first trip we offered was called “Among the Great Herds in Tanzania.” This was 1979 and if you think back to what people expected out of travel then and what their travel patterns were, this was really an unusual, breaking-of-the-mold idea. It was a two-week trip in Tanzania, one week of which was spent in one place. This was sold purely on the basis of my own personal experience; I had spent a lot of time in the Serengeti, and I said, “This is the best place to be at this time of year; we should stay put.” Many people said, “Sven, don’t be ridiculous. People aren’t going to want to go all that way and spend a week in one place.” And a little naively, I said, “What do you mean? That’s the sensible thing to do!” But at the end of the day, I was right. The trip sold out and I was delighted that I could break the mold by just giving people an honest interpretation of a better way to do things. 

Then we had some trips to India, and in the American Southwest, and additional safaris to Africa.  Then in 1981 we started in earnest with ships, chartering them in the beginning, initially in Baja California and Alaska. 

What was it that drew you to ships? 

It actually had a lot to do with my attraction to the Serengeti. Do you know what Serengeti means? 

No, I don’t. 

It means “land of endless space” in Maasai. Have you been to the Serengeti? 

Yes. 

Then you know that it is miles and miles of endless grass plains interrupted with these rocky outcrops called kopjes. I spent a lot of time in those areas and I subsequently did a couple of books on the Serengeti. To me there was a tremendous correlation between the Serengeti and the sea. When I left Africa I was really bereft, I was quite miserable about the fact that I didn’t have that sense of space and I was trying to figure out where to find it. So I started gravitating first to Baja California and to the sea basically, because the islands were like the kopjes, the herds of wildebeest were replaced by great pods of dolphins, and the great mammals were replaced by whales. So in a sense these two environments became very parallel for me. Plus ships gave me a great sense of freedom in that you could access places that you just couldn’t get to otherwise, and that provided us with the ability to have these pure experiences. 

So you started with Baja and expanded from there?  

Yes, we started with Baja and then Alaska, and then in 1987 we got our own ship permanently. Then we went all over the place – the British Isles, the Arctic, the Amazon, Central America, the east coast of Canada and the United States. So we started broadening our geographic range, and then we kept adding ships after that and broadening our range and broadening our range. 

At a certain juncture ships became a very dominant part of our business, and post-9/11, I decided to really focus on the sea, on our core expertise  

What is the customer who comes to you looking for? What kind of traveler takes your trips? 

It’s very difficult to pigeonhole in terms of traditional demographics. Our guests are extremely diverse. There are people who have saved up for years to go to Antarctica, and others who are very wealthy people. The common denominator is real curiosity from a cultural, historical, and natural perspective. Beyond that they are diverse beyond description. 

What do you try to give them as a company? What are the hallmarks of what Lindblad does? 

Well, I look back at my own career and even going back to the late ‘70s at Lindblad Travel. My father built the first purpose-built expedition ship that was ever commissioned in 1969, called the Lindblad Explorer. In those days everywhere that ship went it was the first and usually the only ship offering this kind of travel. You never saw anybody else. So probably the single most powerful component of those trips was that you were an explorer, discovering new territory. He literally opened up most places that we take for granted now  – Antarctica, the Arctic, much of the Amazon, Easter Island, the Seychelles and, by land, Mongolia, Bhutan, Tibet, and on and on – in those days there were hardly any other visitors there.  

So he was very much an ambassador as well as an explorer? 

Oh definitely, he wasn’t schooled in the travel business. He just wanted basically to explore the world. He had three choices. He could be a traditional explorer, which meant he had to raise funds, which he thought could prove difficult. He could be a missionary – but he wasn’t in the least bit religious. Or he could go into the travel business. He chose the last.  

The first year I spent in the Antarctic, there was no one else. So getting back to what we try to give our guests, for a while it was really hard in my own company to accept the fact that we weren’t going to discover the world – that there were no great swathes of territory to discover any more. Instead we had to completely refocus our energy to providing really thoughtful expeditions. So we really delved into the details, the nuances of where we were and what we were going to offer people. On the Endeavor, for example, we now have an ROV [Remotely Operated Vehicle] that can go down to 500 feet, we have hydrophones on all our ships, we have  video chroniclers taking film 24/7 so that everyone has the ability to walk away with their own unique film. We have SplashCams, we built 2 underwater ports for cameras on two of our ships – we’re constantly trying to find ways to be innovative so that we can give people broader experiences both above and below the sea. 

The ability to travel in these remote areas with our extraordinary field staff is a powerful idea; it’s our version of discovery. 

What for you continues to be the juice of this business? What keeps you pumped up every day?  

Ironically, at this point it’s got little to do with personal travel because I don’t do that much anymore. So for me now it’s trying to create this linkage between ourselves as a company, our guests and the places we visit.  We have a real opportunity to play a stewardship role and we are very serious about this. For example, we raise $500,000 a year for conservation activities in the Galapagos Islands. For me that’s the turn-on: Go to a place and try to figure out how your presence can be north of neutral. 

So in many ways you’re still fulfilling that ambassador-explorer role? 

Yes, very much. But I think we’re way more creative than we’ve ever been before. We’ve become really good at identifying needs, and working with local organizations and agencies. We’ve become very good fund-raisers and we find that that has completely changed the landscape of our relationship wherever we are.  It also changes our relationship with our personnel in the field. In the Galapagos, our naturalists are like superheroes. They’re not just guides who work on a ship; they’re the guides who work on a ship and who together with the company and together with the guests, bring in more money to these islands than probably the rest of the tourism industry combined as it relates to conservation support. That’s very motivating. It forces us to do a better job. That’s good for our guests and good for our business; that results in the guests behaving in a certain way, which is good for the place. That motivates the staff – and it all becomes a very nice circle.    

What are the biggest challenges facing you and the adventure travel industry these days?   

Overcrowded conditions,  never-ending regulations based on the lowest common denominator, world politics and the disruption that causes. All these are incredibly powerful factors. In this day and age you have to be as much a political scientist as a travel person.  

What’s an example of the kinds of regulation you’re speaking of? 

In Baja, when we first operated there, we had to have 2 permits;  now we have to have 15 or 16. The problem is that in many parts of the world somebody goes in and makes a mistake – hits a rock, say, or trashes a landing site.  All of a sudden regulations start coming up that say maybe no one should be allowed to go there at all. Alaska for example has completely shrunk as to where you’re allowed to go due to regulation.  The problem is that this has nothing to do with our ability to behave properly in these areas. 

In other words, even though you’ve done nothing wrong, you get roped in with the people who have done unfortunate things. 

That’s how regulation works. It’s not based on understanding you as an individual entity; it’s based on the lowest common denominator. And the more people that go to these remote, pristine areas, the greater the likelihood that something will go wrong. It’s just reality – and you just need to swallow it and move on.    

What’s ahead for Lindblad? 

We’re cautious about expansion – if you expand too quickly, you can screw it all up. We’ll continue to expand in ships – we’ll probably add one ship, possibly 2 ships, next year. After 9/11, 2002 and 2003 were rough, recovering years for us; 2004, ‘05 and ‘06 were great. So we’re ready to expand.  

On another front, we’re also committing within the next 2 or 3 years to be carbon neutral. We’re going to take it all the way. 

How are you going to do that? 

Phase One is to look at the opportunities to reduce emissions. But that’s not that much. We’ll figure out where that is and the rest we’ll offset. We’ve identified three principle areas and entities we’ll work with to do that: reforestation in Ecuador, wind turbines in Alaska, and solar ovens in Baja California. It’s going to be expensive, but I think we should do it. It’s very difficult for us to have the platform we want to have related to this issue if we’re not squeaky clean in this regard. 

And finally, we’re launching our own foundation this year and we’ll take that to a new level of activity.   

What will the foundation do? 

We are very active in the Antarctic, the Galapagos Islands, and Baja California, and we have many smaller activities going on all around the globe. In terms of our philanthropic activities, we’ll be more efficient and more effective, able to do a better job raising matching funds and things of that nature, if we put all our activities under one umbrella.  

Looking back on all your years in this industry, can you crystallize the lessons that stand out? 

First of all, in order to be successful in this business, you have to be incredibly focused. Secondly, you have to be incredibly flexible. Thirdly, you have to be impecably honest, because at the end of the day, your integrity is your only asset when things really hit the fan. Our kinds of businesses don’t fit the traditional mold of businesses, so that the avenues for support, to be able to raise finances, are just different. You have to build that relationship of trust on a variety of levels. This company was saved after 9/11 because I was able to reach out to our guests, who provided us with the $6 million of financing we needed to continue the company. I could not get it through banks or other traditional sources. All those folks who have made investments of one sort of another are happy and are getting the return they expected. This is all very, very satisfying.   

Also, I think you have to have an inordinate respect for people, both your guests and your personnel. You cannot control all the factors so you have to rely on building relationships of trust that are rooted in principles in order to be successful.  

If you’re not a patient person, if you don’t really love people, if you’re not willing to devote some time thinking about the psychology of relationships, I think you might as well forget it. But if you do have all these qualities, this field can be incredibly rewarding.