When Hilary Matson boarded the MV Explorer for her Fall 2007 Semester at Sea voyage, she wasn’t simply signing up for a study abroad experience — she was making a leap that would go on to shape how she now travels, works, and builds community around sustainable, transformational travel experiences.
Hilary, who sailed as a junior from the University of Washington, first heard about SAS from a cousin who’d previously sailed. At first, she brushed it off, focused on her rigorous study schedule as a business major — but, by sophomore year, and with a steadily growing “travel bug,” the idea finally took hold. “If not now, when?” she remembers thinking. With enthusiastic support from her parents, who “gave her roots but provided room to grow,” she applied at the last minute and set sail on SAS.
The experience proved life-changing. Across the varied ports, Hilary’s SAS voyage delivered the kind of experiences that just “don’t fit neatly into a brochure.” In India, a homestay where Hilary and her friends ate off banana leaves and were served fresh chai by a local family felt “very off the beaten path.” In Egypt, a young woman befriended Hilary’s travel group on the streets of Alexandria, invited them home for dinner, and introduced them to her family. “I learned from this that when you meet people in real life, the human connections you can make can be so much warmer and more authentic than what you may read about a place in news articles,” Hilary said.
Experiences like these opened Hilary’s eyes to the beauty of community interaction and locally driven travel: “Semester at Sea helps make experiences that just wouldn’t likely be possible for college students traveling on their own, and I really felt that on my voyage. I was left remembering: ‘How can you make trip experiences like these: where your mind opens up and changes for the better?’”
That question would sit with Hilary for years. After returning to Seattle to finish college and start work, she spent nearly a decade at Amazon, rotating through financial analysis, inventory accounting, inventory management, program management, and senior product marketing management. She also pursued a lifelong goal to live in Paris and, in 2016, moved there through an Amazon transfer. Yet, even after moving to such an exciting international location, the lessons she’d learned – and the questions she’d pondered – on SAS still lingered. And she yearned to be able to return to them.
So, in 2018, Hilary took another bold leap: she left Amazon and started building her next big dream — something she knew by then would involve “eco- tourism, helping people, launching stuff, and building new things.” She started an MBA program at HEC Paris around the same time, and she used the program to test her ideas with expert guidance and mentorship.
By 2020, Hilary had refined her idea, merging her expertise, interests, and those transformative SAS experiences into a new venture: Yugen Earthside, a booking platform and travel agency that “connects mindful travelers to adventurous trips,” with a laser focus on “making sustainable travel easy.” The company’s ethos is reflected in the name, as “yugen” is a Japanese word meaning “an awareness of the universe that triggers an emotional response that is too deep and powerful for words.” For Hilary, it’s the beauty of the natural world, local experiences, and sustainable travel merging together to make moments that create “yugen”— leaving people so inspired they “can’t help but want to take care of the planet.”
Every day, Hilary and her team examine what responsible travel looks like on the ground. They deliberate on the “three pillars of sustainable travel”— environmental, economic, and sociocultural — and, with locals, animals, and the natural environment front-of-mind, she helps curate experiences that both optimize travel experiences and do the right thing for the Earth and local communities.
Today, the core of Yugen Earthside reflects much of what Hilary learned onboard her SAS voyage in 2007 and in locales around the world. “People want to travel well, but they don’t always have all the information,” she said. Her job, then, is to do the “homework” — vetting partners who know what’s ethical and appropriate in their destinations, weighing pros and cons transparently, and curating sustainable travel experiences that will ultimately open minds and change lives. Yugen Earthside also automatically bakes sustainability into its operations by funding carbon removals for every traveler, handled through Tomorrow’s Air, so trips actively remove CO₂ rather than only offset it (they provide travelers with the option to include traditional offsets at checkout); maintaining a third-party–certified carbon-neutral website/company; contributing to impact projects including giving to on-the-ground recovery efforts in partner destinations; and offering 10 kg of carbon removals for each new mailing-list signup.
If Semester at Sea helped plant a seed about the best of local, sustainable travel for Hilary almost 20 years ago, her company, Yugen Earthside, is now a thoughtful, rooted growth. As a “very transformational travel experience,” SAS inspired her to follow what is now a major through-line in her life’s mission. And now, each and every day, Hilary gets to explore and curate for others “the magic of travel–the kind that positively shifts your reality” — just as she’d experienced on her own voyage nearly two decades ago.
