Over the course of this new Change Makers series in collaboration with Mr & Mrs Smith, the travel club for hotel lovers, we explore the travel industry’s role in delivering a more sustainable future in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic and the growing climate emergency.

Each week, host Michael Hayman virtually visits a double act behind one the most innovative and sustainable hotels from Mr & Mrs Smith’s global collection to speak about the challenges they face and hopes for the future.

From creating in Britain to restoring in Italy, connecting to nature in the Maldives and local communities in Brazil; these double acts have curated their own paths, harnessing the joy of travel with the responsibility for protecting our planet – and inspiring others to follow suit. But to begin the journey around the world in eight episodes, Michael pays a virtual visit to the founders of Mr & Mrs Smith themselves, James and Tamara Lohan. They discuss the importance of the people and the stories behind the hotels, looking at the partnerships that built them and the ethos that drives them.

Gavin Esler is an award-winning television and radio broadcaster, journalist and author. His 40-year career at the BBC included a decade as one of the anchors of its flagship news and current affairs programme Newsnight, prompting the Financial Times to note that Gavin “understands the political beast better than anyone.” It is an understanding that has focused his thinking on the power of storytelling in public life: the who we are and the where are we going. And it is his ability to tell these stories and provide answers to these questions that has seen him interview the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Bill Clinton, address challenges of Brexit and the USA’s political discontent, and more recently turn his abilities to a successful collection of novels, focusing on world leaders’ tips for getting to the top.

Leena Nair is the Chief Human Resources Officer for the global giant Unilever. Her work sits at the heart of a team of more than 150,000 people, serving two and a half billion customers – one of the many reasons why she speaks of a personal purpose to “ignite the human spark for a better business and better world”.
 
And igniting a spark is something she knows a good deal about. She has been described as a ‘leader of many firsts’ not least since she was appointed the first female, first Asian and youngest ever Chief Human Resources Officer at Unilever.
 
Of this experience she says, “In every job I've done, I've been the first woman ever to do the job, be in the night shifts or the production work. You've got to be courageous, not only embrace the trailblazing, but also bring your own take on it.”

Joining Michael is US entrepreneur, Phil Libin, Co-Founder & CEO of mmhmm. Phil was born in the USSR and lives in the USA, completing the story of arrivals and departures from Leningrad to the Bronx to Arkansas. From going on to capitalise on the smartphone revolution as CEO of the software sensation Evernote to powering better productivity in the pandemic, this is the story of someone who has followed his own path. 
 
Phil is forging a new way forward for the future of work with his venture which aims to break out of, what he calls, the narrow overheated bubble that is built up in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this conversation he asks why anyone would be asking how to get back, when back wasn't amazing. He’s on a mission to bring optimism to his workforce, and shares how he has been inspired by Star Trek to build a better world. It's perhaps for this reason that business author Tim Ferriss described Phil as an “awesome guy, hilarious and just amazing, amazing.” 

The Queen appointed Sir Ken Olisa OBE as Her Majesty’s Lord-Lieutenant of Greater London in 2015. Sir Ken is a businessman and philanthropist, the founder of two technology merchant banks and the first British-born black man to serve as a Director of a FTSE-100 company. An advocate of social inclusion, he is Chair of Thames Reach, a charity working to shelter and resettle the homeless; Chair of the Shaw Trust, supporting the disabled and chronically unemployed to find work; founding Chair of the Powerlist Foundation, supporting future leaders from Black and Minority Ethnic and disadvantaged backgrounds; a former Governor of the Peabody Trust; and a former Non Executive Director of the West Lambeth NHS Trust. He was awarded a knighthood in the 2018 New Year’s Honours List. In 2019 he became President of London Youth, a member network of 450+ community youth organisations working across London, supporting tens of thousands of young Londoners each year.

Honoured by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader, David Jones is an industry visionary, proponent of corporate responsibility and social change, and The Guardian’s 2013 Sustainable Business Leader. David was the youngest global CEO in the history of advertising, heading both Havas and Havas Worldwide, and the only British CEO of a French publicly traded company. David is co-founder of One Young World, described by CNN as the “Young Davos”, a non-profit organisation that provides brilliant young people with a global platform through which to effect positive change. He was the driving force behind Kofi Annan’s TckTckTck Campaign for Climate Justice, one of the most successful cause campaigns in history, with 18 million people signing on as climate allies. David is the creator of the Social Business Idea® and author of best-selling book Who Cares Wins: Why Good Business Is Better Business, published in 2011. In 2015, he created You & Mr Jones to harness the power of technology to improve marketing, to help clients do their marketing better, faster and cheaper. 

Listed as one of the UK's Top Most Influential Women in Tech & an international multi-award winner for her services to Diversity & Inclusion in industry, Sheree Atcheson is a Global Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Senior Executive; Advisory Board Member, Women Who Code; and a contributor for Forbes. She is the Author of Demanding More, a book which aims to teach readers about how deliberate exclusion has been in systems and society, so we can be purposefully and deliberately inclusive moving forward. Sheree is a Global Diversity & Inclusion Senior Executive at Valtech, having previously worked at Deloitte, Monzo and Peakon. She has worked in many regions developing tailored, data-driven DE&I strategies, with clear goals and lines of accountability to embed success and inclusion that scales. As a passionate advocate for gaining/retaining women in the industry, in 2013, she launched & led the award-winning U.K. expansion of Women Who Code, the world's largest non-profit globally dedicated to women in tech, where she now sits as an Advisory Board Member.

Kenneth Cukier is senior editor and the host of the weekly podcast on technology, Babbage. He is the co-author of the New York Times Bestselling book Big Data with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, which was translated into over 20 languages. In 2021, he co-authored Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil, alongside Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Vericourt. Previously Kenn was the technology editor of the Wall Street Journal Asia in Hong Kong and worked at the International Herald Tribune in Paris. In 2002-04 he was a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Kenn is a board director of Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs), a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and an Associate Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School.

Gordon Brown is the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He served as Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 to 2010 and is widely credited with preventing a second Great Depression through his stewardship of the 2009 London G20 summit. He was one of the first leaders during the global crisis to initiate calls for global financial action, while introducing a range of rescue measures in the UK. Previously, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1997 to 2007, making him the longest-serving Chancellor in modern history. During ten years at the Treasury, Gordon oversaw many of Labour’s flagship policies and achievements, including the Minimum Wage, Sure Start, the Winter Fuel Allowance, the Child Trust Fund, the Child Tax Credit and paid paternity leave. Gordon served as the Labour Member of Parliament for Dunfermline East (1983- 2005), and for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (2005-2015) in his home area of Fife in Scotland. He is a passionate advocate for global action to ensure education for all. In his role as UN Special Envoy for Global Education, he works closely with key partners to help galvanise support for the new International Financing Facility for Education that proposes a groundbreaking way to finance education for every child. 

Mary Ann Sieghart is an experienced journalist, broadcaster and author. Today, she makes programmes for BBC Radio 4, is a Visiting Professor at King’s College London and is a trustee of a large portfolio of organisations and charities. She spent 2018-19 as a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where she researched her latest book, The Authority Gap, on why women are taken less seriously than men. From 2010 to 2012, she wrote a weekly column in The Independent about politics, economics and social affairs, which followed two years as presenter of Newshour, the BBC World Service’s flagship news and current affairs programme. Between 1988 and 2007, Mary Ann was Assistant Editor of The Times, its chief political-leader writer from 1992 to 1999 and acting editor of the Monday edition of the paper from 1997 to 1999. She was a political and social affairs columnist both on the Comment page of the main paper and in the Times 2 section. Mary Ann has extensive TV and radio experience, both in presenting the likes of Newshour, The Big Picture and The World This Week and in appearing as a guest on Question Time, Today, Newsnight, Channel 4 News, The Andrew Marr Show, The Daily Politics and more. Before joining The Times, Mary Ann was political correspondent of The Economist, City Editor of Today newspaper and a Lex columnist and Eurobond correspondent at the Financial Times.