About
Tom Mercer is an enthusiastic, if tactical traveler, who enjoys traveling by the seat of his pants and ever so occasionally getting burned for it. Most recently, Tom took three weeks out of his summer to hike the length of the John Muir Trail in the Sierra Nevada – from Yosemite Valley to Mount Whitney. He’s also enjoyed recent trips to Peru, Vancouver, Vermont, and New Mexico, and he harbors quite a bit of nostalgic wanderlust for the year he took a few years back to live in Moscow, New Zealand, and Chile. An upcoming trip to coffee farms on Guatemala’s volcanic Ant Plano should rekindle the flame.
Tom has worked for Fodor’s Travel Guides and Let’s Go Travel Publishing, but he’s escaped the travel publishing world for greener pastures on the West Coast. He’s always been interested in environmental issues, and looks forward to exploring them more with you here on the blog and during his “day job” as a student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In his free time, Tom enjoys cooking and eating (in that order), running, and exploring his new surroundings with his wife. If he can whip himself into shape, he may just participate in his first-ever triathlon in 2008.
Tom’s Green Travel Pet Peeve: The travel industry needs rigorous environmental standards and certifications, not individual companies issuing press releases every time they launch a new “green” initiative.
Yen Lee is a travel omnivore who enjoys visiting iconic attractions, meeting locals, eating, getting outdoors, and just wandering around. He seizes on almost every opportunity to enjoy weekend getaways, boondoggle short leisure extensions on business trips, or escape for longer sabbaticals. In fact, not so long ago, he enjoyed a 6-month break with his two daughters and his wife to visit family in Singapore and Malaysia, tackle the Big Island of Hawaii, and attend a 25-person family reunion in Surrey, UK. Some of his favorite trips have been outdoors, whether it’s up in the Sierra Nevada, on a zip trek in Whistler, cycling through the Gulf Islands, or kayaking the Queen Charlotte Islands.
Yen is the founder of the travel site www.Kango.com, and has worked at companies such as Yahoo and City search. After years of working for online travel sites to provide travelers the best information, Yen is passionate about taking that that mission one step further to incorporate the environmental impacts of travel and the decisions travelers can make while on the road to mitigate those impacts.
When not working and hanging out with the family, Yen enjoys napping, dark chocolate, open-water racing and recently swam in his first competitive swim pool meet in almost 20 years at the world masters swim championships. Yen was born in Singapore and moved to Vancouver when he was 10. Yen graduated a longtime ago from the University of Western Ontario and then MIT.
Yen’s Green Travel Pet Peeve: Buying carbon offsets doesn’t really solve for the carbon we create when we travel.
