Namche Bazaar in the Khumbu Valley of Nepal is a popular stop on the trek to Everest Basecamp, a top adventure travel destination.
Kristin Hostetter
Adventure travel is a $265 billion industry. Adventure travel encompasses soft adventure like cycling, canoeing, fly-fishing, snorkeling, ecotourism, cultural trips, environmentally sustainable travel, culinary tours, and going on safari and hard adventure including climbing, caving, heli-skiing, kite-surfing, and trekking.
According to the Adventure Travel Trade Association's (ATTA) 2015 Attracting and Serving the U.S. Adventure Traveler report, hiking and trekking are the most popular adventure travel activities for travelers of all experience levels.
According to ATTA adventure traveler demographics, the largest group of adventure travel tour operator clients (41 percent) are between the ages of 50-70. The average age of the adventure traveler reported is 49 years old.
SNEWS covers news about adventure travel industry leaders, conservation efforts, tour operators, destinations, gear and apparel, data and Adventure Travel Trade Association events and inititatives.
There’s a demographic shift taking place in the United States: By the year 2045, we’ll be a non-white majority country and the outdoor industrywill either follow suit or flounder. That fact alone should motivate companies to diversify both their internal hires and customer base, ...read more
Monet Hambrick of The Traveling Child journeys around the world for a living with her children. In 2019, she authored The Traveling Child Goes to Rio de Janeiro, a children's book that teaches culture through the eyes of two traveling sisters. And earlier this year, she became a ...read more
Outdoor guides and adventure travel companies are known to adapt to any situation. A thunderstorm sweeps through camp; a client rolls his ankle on a talus field; your co-guide suffers from altitude sickness at basecamp. Guides are no strangers to mitigating risk in the field, and ...read more
We've heard the story dozens of times now. A big event was cancelled. A virtual substitute was conceived. It either worked—or it didn't. AdventureELEVATE, the annual networking and educational conference hosted by the Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA), followed this ...read more
It's nine o'clock on a Monday morning. Tom Wolfe sits down to start his week. He checks his email, then his Google AdWords account. He fires off a few text messages to clients, asking how they're doing. Still fine. Nothing new. He gets ready for a Zoom call. This might sound ...read more
Staying safe while traveling is of primary importance for many outdoor participants right now. As summer kicks off, quarantine restrictions ease, and people across the country start planning trips, adherence to a sensible set of safety measures will be critical for containing the ...read more
We're heartbroken to report that the outdoor community lost one of its own in recent days. Aliaa Abaza, the Adventure Travel Trade Association's community lead for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, passed away last weekend from complications of COVID-19. Aliaa is the first ...read more
Skiers and snowboarders, we get it. You want to be outside right now. You weren't ready for the season to come to such an abrupt end, as it did in Colorado and virutally everywhere else. You're tempted to pull out your backcountry setup and keep the fun going yourself. Plenty of ...read more
It’s 3 p.m. on a Tuesday in February and a palpable energy is building inside a new hotel at the base of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. As I walk from my van into the lobby of Continuum, I first notice the massive, theater-sized screen above the soft-lit bar playing recaps of ...read more
Gear brands are taking advantage of the adventure travel boom—and not by making duffels. The United Nations World Tourism Organization has recorded robust growth in the number of international tourist trips over the past three years, and outdoor brands are jumping to ...read more
Within an hour of disembarking a small plane at the Redmond Municipal Airport near Bend, Oregon, I find myself in the woods at the front desk of my hotel, LOGE Camps, for the weekend. Except it doesn't feel like a hotel. There's a cafe and bar, where a group of mountain bikers ...read more
What do you get when a record number of climbers ascend Everest? More trash, the Nepalese government discovered this year after collecting over 11 tons from the world's tallest mountain in May. It's been called the "world's highest garbage dump." To cut down on waste, Nepal is ...read more
In January 2019, SNEWS launched a comprehensive outdoor industry salary survey in partnership with Category One to gather concrete data on salaries of people working in the outdoor industry, from sales to PR, from marketing to gear design, from retail to media, from athletes to ...read more
The world of magazine publishing is changing rapidly as the expectation of digital content becomes the standard. Today, consumers are less inclined to stop and pick up a magazine and more likely to pick up their phones. In a screen-dominated society, print magazines are looking ...read more
Every year, Americans spend more on outdoor recreation than they do on pharmaceuticals and fuel, combined, the Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) reports. The outdoor recreation economy generates $887 billion in annual consumer spending, 7.6 million jobs, $65.3 billion in federal ...read more
Mt. Everest is expensive and hard to get to, let alone a beast to climb. It's become known as an experience only for the wealthy. And frankly, Suzanne "Sunny" Stroeer thinks not enough women are climbing high-altitude peaks. But today, Stroeer through her guiding business, ...read more
It's 5 a.m. in Bryce Canyon National Park and a group of people with cameras are alone in the park under the starry sky. Their feet stamp the ground, they rub their frozen hands together to warm them, and their coffee steams as they open thermoses. When the first ...read more
Elevator Pitches are written by the company and edited for space and clarity. They do not express the opinions of SNEWS or its editors. Ride the elevator with Taylor Pawley, Sunny Eaton, Karin Balsley, and Ashley Giordano, of Women Overlanding the World Retreats. We are a group ...read more
As the federal government shutdown continues into its fifth week, the business of outdoor recreation is feeling the effects. Specialty retail stores and adventure outfitters located in gateway communities near national parks are on the front lines of a political conflict that has ...read more
Elevator Pitches are written by the company and edited for space and clarity. They do not express the opinions of SNEWS or its editors. Ride the elevator with Michael Cohen, owner of Channel Islands Adventure Company. Channel Islands National Park—dubbed “The Galapagos of North ...read more
Elevator Pitches are written by the company and edited for space and clarity. They do not express the opinions of SNEWS or its editors. Ride the elevator with David Verde, showrunner of AWOL. Have you ever grabbed the remote and noticed that outdoor/adventure travel shows are ...read more
Elevator Pitches are written by the company and edited for space and clarity. They do not express the opinions of SNEWS or its editors. Ride the elevator with Jason Epperson, Producer/Host of America's National Parks Podcast. The America's National Parks Podcast tells the story ...read more
Elevator Pitches are written by the company and edited for space and clarity. They do not express the opinions of SNEWS or its editors. Ride the elevator with Gemma Peckham, founder of ROVA Magazine. Have you ever noticed that all of the magazines dedicated to RVing and ...read more
Zero debris in the crystal-clear water shields the riverbed from the cobalt sky. I can see every shade of pebble beneath the flowing surface of central Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon River, one of the eight inaugural rivers protected by the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, ...read more