<\/p>\n
When she became a vegetarian about four years ago, Colin Corbett, a waitress based in Tampa, Florida, thought she might starve or be forced to eat meat when traveling abroad. Instead, it was just the beginning of her exploration of the thriving botanical destinations that have thrived around the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe way I make my bucket list has changed,\u201d she said in an interview between trips to Peru in December and Dublin in March. \u201cIt used to be just scenic things. Now, I find myself adding cities that I didn’t care about before, but that have thriving botanical scenes. I just added Warsaw.\u201d<\/p>\n
While vegetarians and vegans are both minorities in the United States, an increasing number of people are more interested in reducing their meat consumption, often for environmental reasons, because livestock operations produce climate-disruptive methane.<\/p>\n
The travel industry is grappling with hotels, restaurants, festivals, and plant-focused tours as veganism becomes increasingly associated with sustainable travel, and not just during what some people call vegan, an annual campaign in January to highlight the vegan diet of the month traditionally associated with goodwill.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Justin Francis, co-founder and CEO of Responsible Travel, a tour company focused on sustainability, which has seen demand for its vegan tours four times in the past decade. “As more people turn to planet-friendly diets, travel is responding.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Vegetarian diets consist exclusively of plant foods, excluding meat as well as foods derived from animals such as eggs, dairy products, and honey.<\/p>\n
It is difficult to say how many vegetarians there are in the United States. A 2019 survey by Ipsos Retail Performance found that 9.7 million Americans were vegan compared to about 300,000 15 years ago. However, a 2018 Gallup poll found that 5 percent of Americans who said they were vegetarian and 3 percent who said they were vegetarian did not change much from 2012.<\/p>\n
Still, many are eating greener. In a 2019 Nielsen survey, 62 percent of Americans said they would be willing to reduce meat consumption based on environmental concerns. Many of their cravings for meat have been satisfied with fake meats by brands like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. The Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes alternative proteins, said 2020 was a record year for investment in alternatives at $3.1 billion, more than three times the $1 billion invested in 2019.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Joan Roca, founder and CEO of Essentialist, a members-only travel planning services company, said, referring to the popular Eleven Madison Park restaurant in New York City that went vegan last year. She expects “green eating” to grow in 2022.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Hotels are rolling out a plant-based welcome mat with vegetarian menus and interior design.<\/p>\n
Vegetarian restaurant additions extend to the accommodation portfolio, from Marriott Bonvoy’s Aloft hotels \u2014 which recently added vegetarian and vegan breakfast items in the fast-food lobby markets of more than 150 North American hotels \u2014 to upscale Peninsula Hotels, which will launch a wellness initiative New in March, including vegetarian dishes plus sleep-enhancing aromatherapy.<\/p>\n
Some have used the 2020 pandemic hiatus to turn a new page, so to speak, including the Andaz Mayakoba resort in Mexico’s Riviera Maya, which introduced VB, short for a vegetarian bar, serving rice ball salads and beach-side tea-leaf wraps.<\/p>\n
Since 2017, when I hired vegan chef Leslie Dorso, Four Seasons Resort Punta Mita in Mexico has been accommodating an expanded range of diets. It now offers over 200 vegetarian menu items and creates dishes based on guest allergies and dietary restrictions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
“Rather than treating this as an afterthought, we are providing a safe place for travelers to relax and unwind that truly anticipates their needs,” she wrote in an email.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Menus aren’t the only vegetarian aspects of hotels in the animal-free vanguard. The rooms have become vegetarian with vegan facilities and interior design.<\/p>\n
In Mykonos, Greece, the Koukoumi Hotel opened in 2020 with a vegetarian restaurant, a spa that uses only botanical massage oils and rooms furnished with vegan coir mattresses. In the UAE, the 394-room Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi plans to open two vegan rooms in February with a vegan minibar and room service.<\/p>\n
In London, of its 292 rooms, Hilton London Bankside offers a Vegan Suite built with plant-based materials, including bamboo floors and pineapple vegan leather cushions. The pillow menu offers feather-free stuffing options like buckwheat, millet, and vegetarian snacks that fill minibars. Guests have been allocated vegan leather seating in the restaurant.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople love it because we take it very seriously,\u201d James Clark, the hotel’s general manager, said, adding that it was “not cheap,” at over $800 a night.<\/p>\n
Many of the new vegan hotels tend to be upscale, like Palmaia’s all-inclusive – The House of Aia in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, where all food is vegan and furnishings are leather and feather-free (couples start around $900 a night).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Vegetarian activities have grown at the Anse Chastanet Resort in St. Lucia, which added a vegan restaurant four years ago. A vegan chef offers Rastafarian Creole cooking classes and she is vegan. Chocolate-making classes produce vegan bars and the on-site brewery uses fruit and cassava for its vegan beer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Co-owner of the resort, Carolyn Trubetzkoy, compared having vegan options to maintaining eco-centric operations. “A certain percentage of travelers check in, and vegetarians are the same,” she said. “A small percentage say they come here because you have a vegan restaurant, but this one will grow,” she added, noting that the resort recently held a vegan wedding for 24 people.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
For travelers who don’t want to hunt down every meal, tour operators and travel agents offer a guarantee that they will be able to keep up their meals and eat well, especially outside.<\/p>\n
Last year, Responsible Travel added nearly 1,000 vegan-friendly tours as part of its commitment to becoming “nature positive,” a pledge not to harm wildlife or habitat but to leave them more protected and supported, by 2030.<\/p>\n
Her vegan-only holidays include a 10-day botanical tour in Ethiopia (from about $2,300; prices do not include flights), seven days of volcanoes in Guatemala (from about $1,360) and eight days of snowshoeing in Austria (from about 1,160 dollars).<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe this decade will see travel companies not only get better at catering to vegetarians, but actively work to offer the best foods and experiences,\u201d said Mr. Francis of Responsible Travel.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Brigid Reed and Sebastian Ringer have been disappointed by expensive pasta dishes with tomato sauce and a lack of soy milk at breakfast buffets in upscale hotels, experiences that helped guide their company World Vegan Travel, which provides trips including gorilla safaris in Rwanda and tours on The basis of the villas in Tuscany.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cWhen 20 people come for three nights, hotels are more likely to put in more effort than they do for one person,\u201d Ms Reed said.<\/p>\n
Leslie Lucas-Recio, a former food importer living in Portland, Oregon, was an experienced overseas traveler when she joined the World Vegan trip to Alsace, France, in 2018.<\/p>\n
“If you want to experience culture or focus on the outdoors, the last thing you want to worry about is trying to find something that isn’t french fries and green salad,” she said.<\/p>\n
Donna Ziegfinger, owner of Green Earth Travel and co-founder of the Vegan Travel Summit that runs online through January 30, said the diet has become more popular in the more than 30 years she has been organizing vegan tours.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are countries I started going to in the 1980s that I thought wouldn\u2019t be vegetarian, and now they are among the best vegan countries,\u201d she said, citing Spain and France. “The joke was back in the day, you were going to show up at the French border and show your vegan passport and they’d turn you away.”<\/p>\n
For her vegan clients, Ms. Ziegfinger makes sure hotels know she’s vegan and makes them replace feather bedding. For Heidi Prescott, a customer and frequent cruiser in North Potomac, Maryland, the notification often resulted in a letter sent on board from the cooking crew requesting a meeting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
“I’ve always hated meeting the chef,” said Mrs. Prescott. “I was going to eat around it.”<\/p>\n
Now, there’s a lot more vegan diversity at sea \u2014 Regent Seven Seas Cruises serves more than 200 vegan dishes, while Virgin Voyages has a plant-focused restaurant on board her ship, the Scarlet Lady \u2014 and the messages are off. Last fall, Mrs. Prescott sailed with Oceania Cruises around the Baltic Sea, the 11th cruise with the line, which carries staples like cashew cheese and limits vegetarian options to pasta and cereal bars.<\/p>\n
Paul Tully, a vegan and CEO of Better Safaris, organizes sustainable, vegan-friendly trips to Africa, where he said it’s relatively easy to eat vegan.<\/p>\n
“Surprisingly, it is the airlines that seem to be slow on this rise in vegan activity, and many of them still offer very bland food and limited options for vegans,” he wrote in an email.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Destinations, by contrast, are keen to promote their vegan cred. The Virginia Bureau of Tourism said that visitors spend an average of more than five minutes on pages related to Virginia.org’s vegetarian and vegan content, which is roughly two minutes more than general travel content.<\/p>\n
Until January 30, the World Expo 2020 Dubai is holding what it calls the first vegetarian food festival in the Middle East. In September, tour operator Vigan Travel Asia from Fig Voyage is planning what it calls the first Himalayan vegan festival, taking place in Nepal and Bhutan with panel discussions, cooking workshops and a vegan village of more than 100 exhibitors.<\/p>\n
Big cities have always been plant refuges. Happycow, a digital platform for vegan dining, ranks London as the world’s best city for vegan dining with over 150 vegan restaurants, followed by New York, Berlin, Los Angeles and Toronto.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
But vegetarianism is becoming easier to find in rural areas\u2014Argyll, in western Scotland, has a new vegan pathway connecting vegan cafes and inns\u2014and in smaller cities like Boise, Idaho, home to a vegan food truck, soul food restaurant, and a tattooed shopping and dining tour.<\/p>\n
Dining tours from Greenville, South Carolina to Scottsdale, Arizona have flourished as ways to introduce vegetarian visitors to local options. In Tel Aviv, Eager Tourist began offering vegan culinary tours visiting food markets, farmers and restaurants in 2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cHonestly, it’s more interesting than a non-vegetarian tour,\u201d said Ross Belfer, partner in the company, an American who lives in Israel. “What Israelis can do with vegetables is unparalleled, in my humble opinion.”<\/p>\n
Elaine Glusak writes the frugal traveler’s column. Follow her on Instagram <\/em>Tweet embed<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n Follow the New York Times Travel <\/em><\/strong>employment <\/em>Instagram<\/em>And <\/em>Twitter<\/em><\/a> And <\/em>Facebook social networking site<\/em>. And <\/em>Subscribe to the weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter<\/em> To receive expert travel smart tips and inspiration for your next vacation.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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