Filippos Venetopoulos: It was a very tough season to take over, but it was also a good opportunity because we were able to sit down as a team and really rethink our product, where are we headed, what is really our brand, where do we want to be in the next 10 to 20 years as a business. So we've been a 70 year old business starting in 1949, and it was a really good time for us to rethink the process. Our
vision is now crystal clear within the business, to create a better world at sea. How do you do it ? It's really delivering the destinations on community- based tourism, on going deeper into the destination, on immersing into the culture and the people and trying the local cuisine and the local flavors : it's real- ly crystallizing our message. In the Seychelles, we offer a seven-day cruise, during which we discover the inner islands of the archipelago, some well- known, others much less so. Here, the granite rocks plunge into the Indian Ocean, and snorkelling is full of great surprises. Welcome to the Vallée de Mai, on the island of Praslin, a nature reserve listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1983 for its excep- tional flora and fauna. This forest has remained vir- tually unchanged since prehistoric times. It is the world's largest coco-de-mer forest (a palm tree that produces the largest seed in the plant kingdom). We have a local chef and a local guide on board who introduce passengers to their culture: the cuisine is local. We organise fishing activities and work with Seychelles schools to support one of the fundamen- tal pillars of the Variety Cares Foundation, which is education for all. So we're working to help educating children from the local communities on how to sus- tain the environment, even though Seychelles is a very sustainable country in itself, so we're also lear- ning at the same time. That's what really communi- ty-based tourism is. You learn from the community, but the community also learns from you. So it's kind of sharing the knowledge from both the best worlds . www.varietycruises.com
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~C L A S S & R E L A X L I F E S T Y L E M A G A Z I N E - 2024 ~
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