Behind-the-scenes of our 2026 Asia Pacific Regional Hub Meeting
From the moment you arrive at Cardamom Tented Camp, a 40-minute journey upriver by boat, you are already part of the battle to save the forest around you. "Your Stay Keeps the Forest Standing," goes the camp's motto. This June, it is where our Asia Pacific members gathered to work through their hardest challenges as a community.
“The collaborative spirit, willingness to learn from one another and shared commitment to solving challenges together demonstrate the true strength of The Long Run. I left feeling inspired, motivated and optimistic for the future.”
The story behind Cardamom Tented Camp, our host in Cambodia
Rangers patrolling Botum Sakor National Park were once pulling more than 3,000 snares, along with dozens of chainsaws and guns, from the forest each year. Poachers and loggers were hollowing it out from the inside, and this vital elephant migration route was close to being lost to logging and slash-and-burn farming.
Cardamom Tented Camp was the answer, a way to protect Botum Sakor National Park from poachers and loggers. It works as a three-way partnership: Wildlife Alliance brings the forest, its rangers and the surrounding communities, YAANA Ventures the tourism expertise, and Minor Hotels the financial backing to build for impact rather than a quick return.
Allan Michaud, who runs the camp, was there when it began. After more than twenty years in Cambodia's forests, what struck him most was the absence of manmade sounds: "It had been a long while since I hadn't heard chainsaws revving 24/7." Held on an 18,073-hectare, 50-year conservation concession, the camp is deliberately hard to reach: twelve solar-powered tents, no road access, everything arriving by boat, run on one principle, "Your Stay Keeps the Forest Standing."
The tents don’t scrimp on creature comforts. The twelve luxury safari-style tents have proper beds and rain showers (powered, like everything else, by solar panels).
Guest stays fund the rangers who protect the forest, giving local people a steady income where poaching and logging once offered only an unpredictable one.
As Allan puts it, "We believe tourism is a good and sustainable way to preserve and prosper the nature and communities in this protected area." A few dedicated people and a campsite are offering fresh hope to a place long at the mercy of humans, and a chance for travellers to see it for themselves.
The camp at dawn. As Allan says, “We can’t ensure that you will see a monkey, let alone a gibbon, a bear or some of the rarer birds, but we can guarantee peace and quiet.”
The evidence is in the numbers, documented in their 2025 Impact Report. In 2025 alone, the rangers removed 819 snares and 632 metres of bird nets, cleared 15 illegal camps and confiscated 22 chainsaws. They rescued two Sunda pangolins, the most trafficked animal in the world. And with 25 new camera traps now watching the forest, the wildlife is returning: a rare marbled cat, and four new snake species, were spotted and recorded for the first time in 2025.
It is the clearest possible version of what The Long Run stands for: tourism that protects the nature it depends on. It is exactly why our members choose to work this way, and why it is fitting that Cardamom hosted this year's Asia Pacific Regional Hub Meeting, which brought our members together from across the region under the theme "From Influence to Evidence: The 4Cs in Practice."
The oriental garden lizard lending a skeptical eye to Olivier Marchesin’s camera lens.
What makes this so different to a conference
Two things set our regional hub meetings apart from the usual industry gathering:
Nothing here is a passive presentation. The meeting is deliberately designed so that every member arrives with a real, unresolved problem and leaves with the beginnings of an answer. The honest answers that emerge tell us, as a community, where our members really need support. Three of those challenges, and the solutions the room offered, are further down.
The back-of-house tour. Allan led the group through the operational heart of the camp for close to two hours, and it turned into a masterclass in conservation-led hospitality.
After a morning hike, the team settled into Jeremy’s session with pineapple pieces to snack on and cool cloths to fight the humidity.
Back-of-house highlights:
The camp separates several waste streams, including plastic, cardboard, cans, metal, cooking oil, and beer bottles, ensuring that as much material as possible is diverted from landfill
The entire camp runs on solar energy, which means no fuel deliveries by boat and no generator noise. The one real threat is lightning, so the panels now sit behind oversized rods after a strike once took out the entire system
After dusk, a white cloth is strung up to draw moths and insects. It’s not just for scientists. Guests are welcome to take a closer look and discover the rich biodiversity thriving just steps from their tent.
“These meetings remind me that we my not have all the answers but someone, somewhere, has faced similar challenges and has insights to share.”
Interesting takeaway from the back-of-house tour: The staff quarters, usually hidden away, became the highlight of the tour. Sirikoi is a small, family-run property that invests deeply in its own people (what our 4C framework calls their ‘internal community’). The staff quarters felt warm and homely, and were good enough that members stayed for tea. They also commented on how the Head of Maintenance office and staff canteen was the best they’ve ever seen. It’s a small thing that people take for granted but many members left thinking, ‘Oh wow, this is impressive. We need to prioritise this.’
What we learned from the Cambodian rangers
For a deeper understanding of the challenges the area faces, guests can join a trek with the rangers. For many members, it was the first time meeting forest rangers up close, and there was real pride in simply being able to shake their hands. What stayed with the group was the scale of the ground these rangers cover and the risk inherent in the work.
The group huddle at the ranger patrol station.
The station held chainsaws, snares and other equipment confiscated from poachers over the years. One ranger showed the group how a snare is actually set, and held up a homemade firearm that, in his words, "could kill a deer with one shot."
The rangers cover 18,000 hectares, but they do not patrol all of it. They watch specific "red zones" near the likely entry points and hold position, sometimes for two or three days, until they get a result. It is slow, unglamorous work, and the proof is in the count: rangers pulled 2,215 snares from this forest in 2014, and by 2018 that had fallen to 351, a fall of more than 80% in four years.
The walk itself, from the Old Ranger Station back to camp, took over an hour and turned into a masterclass in medicinal trees.
The relationship between the rangers and the surrounding villages cuts both ways. Many people report sightings to rangers urgently; others are harder to win over, and family loyalty can complicate an arrest. One ranger's proudest moment was the time villagers stepped in to help him when he was outnumbered and cornered during an arrest.
Asked what he would say if given a platform, his answer was as clear as the meeting's whole theme: without the forest there is no wildlife, and without wildlife he has no job, so protect the forest. And asked what communities actually need from those who want to help, he was just as direct: not one-off gifts of books or pens, but training them with marketable skills. Teaching someone to raise pigs only helps, he said, if there is somewhere to sell them.
Three honest challenges, with crowd-sourced solutions
Where you don’t have all the answers, collective minds in The Long Run community will.
Three core challenges surfaced that members across the region will recognise. None is fully solved, but each left the room with a clearer way forward.
Challenge: Funding the 3Cs
A room-wide exchange, opened by Hendry Sianipar of Cempedak and Nikoi and Sukhum Jarangdej of Khiri Travel.
Solution: Diversify the income, and connect guests to the cause
Three lessons came out of the exchange:
Conservation cannot depend on a single source of income. Hendry’s model at Cempedak Private Island is the example: rather than lean on tourism profit alone, the Island Foundation draws on guest donations, fundraising, corporate partnerships and grants.
Guests who feel connected to the story give far more readily. Remi explains that when you his team ties The Datai Langkawi’s guest levy to visible community projects rather than only environmental ones, guest buy-in jumped, and Jeremy and Justine made the same point from their own work: people feel more connected to the cause when they can empathise with the humans they’re impacting. Make sure those human stories are visible.
Make the charge simple, and make it ultra-clear where the money goes. Khiri Travel builds in 50c per traveller per day, capped at $10 however long the trip runs. The Datai adds a $12-per-room-per-night community and conservation charge to every bill by default, with a simple opt-out. Both work because guests can see exactly where their money lands.
Challenge: Communicating sustainability
Raised by Natalie Van Ogtrop of Cardamom Tented Camp.
Solution: Let one vivid number, your people and your guests tell the story
Cardamom Tented Camp is where you disconnect to reconnect with nature. With no Wi-Fi, poor cell reception and a reliance on solar power, you are completely off the grid. That’s the appeal. But it also leaves a real question: how do you tell that sustainability story, and market it, when switching off is the whole point? The room's answers:
Lead with one vivid number the guest is part of. Water and waste figures don't land because they’re about the property, not the guest. The best marketing answers the question ‘What’s in it for me?’. Take the example the room kept coming back to as a great metric to market to guests: every traveller who books a room at Cardamom Tented Camp plants 10 mangrove seedlings, which offset roughly 7.7 tonnes of CO2 over 25 years. The guest suddenly goes home with a sense of pride because they can visualise the impact they’ve made.
Let your own people and guests carry the story, not an agency. The group questioned whether it is worth hiring social media managers who never set foot in the camp, or chasing an AI-driven approach, when being off-grid is the whole point. Better and cheaper: staff filming their own work and the wildlife, and guests posting once they are home.
Build the story in before guests arrive. With most stays only a night or two, the moment to involve people is at the point of booking. Folding community and conservation activities into the booking itself, the way The Datai Langkawi does, lifts participation before anyone steps off the boat.
Challenge: Commerce under pressure
Led by Jeremy Tran of Asia Sustainable Travel
Solution: Put your energy where you actually have power
A conservation lodge is still a business, and it has to survive commercially while holding the line on sustainability. The hard part is that the biggest threats, governments, markets, airlines, global instability, are things no single property can control. So Justine Jay Vaz of The Habitat Foundation put the sharp question to the room: given how little leverage any property has over airlines or ministries, is that really where your energy should go? The answer was no. Focus on what you can actually move:
Change who sells your rooms. Justine's own answer was better-trained travel agents who can genuinely sell a sustainable product, plus a webinar series putting member properties in front of the partner networks that send the right guests. You can't move an airline, but you can change who is selling for you.
Diversify who you reach. Researchers, schools and institutions are underused audiences, and the domestic market is a question of fit, not price: at Nay Palad, cutting rates changed nothing, but a single unpaid visit from a local influencer drove twenty to thirty bookings.
Do the unglamorous outreach. Irene's clearest win was also the least glamorous: direct sales calls cut Nay Palad's projected zero-occupancy days next low season from 63 to 28, within weeks, even as instability in the Middle East was depressing demand.
What members actually take home
For all the practical lessons, the thing members talk about afterwards is each other. Connections deepen once you share a meal or a kayak instead of a video call. In the opening circle, where a talking stick was passed around and whoever held it spoke, the conversation turned honest fast: the pressure of never quite knowing if you are doing sustainability right, and the exhaustion of keeping a small operation in step with much bigger ones.
“I came to Cambodia expecting to learn from others. I left remembering a part of myself that I had almost forgotten.”
As Olivier Marchesin of Lost Road Travel wrote afterwards, "These meetings go far beyond professional exchange. They are raw, open, and deeply human." The thread running through the three days was that none of us has it all figured out, and that real community means sharing your problems rather than hiding them. There were firsts too, a first kayak for some, a first night safari for others, and more than one member left realising that sustainability touches more of their work than they had assumed.
Hendry, who ran a hands-on soil session for the group, caught it best: "I came to Cambodia expecting to learn from others. I left remembering a part of myself that I had almost forgotten."
The meeting closed the way it began, at the jetty, drinks in hand and feet in the river, the last light going down over camp. Our heartfelt thanks to Allan and the whole Cardamom Tented Camp team for their warm hospitality, for sharing the work and the lessons behind the scenes.