Nada Raphael does not like the word tourist.
“A traveller comes and goes. A traveller is more responsible. A traveller is somebody who’s really curious about what’s happening inside the country,” she says. The distinction sits at the heart of Tourleb, the socially responsible tour operator she co-founded in Lebanon with Joelle Sfeir.
The company, also known as TLB Destinations, was born out of distance. Raphael and Sfeir were living in Montreal when they noticed how rarely Lebanon entered conversations about the Middle East, and how, when it did, the talk turned to war.
The country had been quietly removed from the tourist map. The pair wanted to put it back.
The first idea was an NGO. They abandoned it, wary of the bureaucracy and the corruption that could come with it, and chose instead to build a business. Raphael had been operating in Lebanon in some form since 1997; Tourleb took its current company shape in 2013. Her own path into the work ran through Hyphen Islam-Christianity, a 2010 book, documentary and photography project on Christian and Muslim coexistence that toured more than 20 cities.
The aim was simple and stubborn: work with as many locals as possible, and give travellers a reason to stay, spend and come back.
Raphael’s pitch for Lebanon rests on its compression. It is small, which means a visitor can cover ground quickly, and it is dense with things to do. A traveller can ski in the mountains and snorkel in the sea, meet artisans, and walk through 3,500 years of history.
“We have a lot of people who are just dying to meet people from outside Lebanon,” she says, calling the country underrated.
The harder part is everything outside her control. Lebanon sits in a corner of the world that global crises rarely forget, she says, and trouble elsewhere has a way of arriving on Lebanese soil. The shocks are sometimes economic, more often geopolitical.
“Our challenge is to stay alive. Our challenge is to survive,” Raphael says. “Our challenge is to keep people safe.”
To manage that, Tourleb runs what Raphael calls a watch programme, mapping the country into safer and riskier zones and drawing on operators on the ground who track how each region is evolving in real time. Travellers who want to take on more risk do so at their own responsibility; for everyone else, the company works to keep them out of harm’s way.
The approach has held. Since 2013, Raphael says, no client has come to harm. Tourleb operates online through Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, and through its website at tourleb.org.