Hilary Bradt to receive MBE

Pioneering publisher and traveller Hilary Bradt has been included in this year’s Birthday Honours List published by Buckingham Palace on 14th June 2008 ‘for services to the tourist industry and to charity’. The honour acknowledges Hilary’s achievements in opening up new destinations and encouraging ‘responsible tourism’, even before the phrase was coined. In the past Bradt Travel Guides published the first dedicated guides to among others Vietnam, Madagascar, Tanzania and Uganda, all now firmly established on the adventurous tourists’ trail.

Guides to contemporary post conflict destinations such as Bosnia & Herzegovina and in particular Rwanda have been credited with playing a pivotal role in re-starting the countries’ ecotourism industries. Recently Bradt published the first guide to Congo for over ten years, it is hoped with similar positive results.

Hilary Bradt has been fearless in promoting destinations that will never attract mass-market tourism and associated best-seller book sales. Her publishing criteria have never been defined solely by economics. Instead she has trusted to gut feeling, a good author and a genuine wish to promote travel benefitting host countries as much as travellers.

As patron of the British charity Money for Madagascar, which receives 10% of her royalties, she has been active in encouraging tourists to get involved with charities in that country, both through her guide to Madagascar and by harnessing the goodwill of women who knit baby clothes, and of tourists willing to hand-carry them to Madagascar. She estimates that she has sent a couple of thousand hand-knits to two charities that work with destitute children.

For more information, visit Bradtguides.com.