A study released in March by the American Hotel and Lodging Educational Foundation found that U.S. hotel companies contributed an average of 0.06 percent of their annual sales to charity. But one of the hallmarks of effective social-responsibility programs is sustainability—meaning, as at Banyan Tree, they are ongoing and incorporated into a company's way of doing business. One-off philanthropy—say, making a donation to an orphanage or a cancer fund—is wonderful, but such contributions can be terminated at any time. The most committed hotel and travel companies include environmental practices and community programs in their evaluation of managers. Accor, British Airways, Fairmont, Hilton, InterContinental, Marriott, and Ritz-Carlton—to name just a few—all have internal systems for evaluating their own "corporate social responsibility" programs.

Social responsibility is certainly on the agenda at InterContinental's Asian headquarters in Singapore. A few days before Meusburger shows me his new shelter in Phuket, I literally bump into his boss, Patrick Imbardelli, the hard-charging Australian CEO of InterContinental Hotels Group Asia, in the hallway there. Standing in front of a giant map of Asia, Imbardelli points to colored markers before him as if he were planning a war. "We're growing so fast out here. We're adding sixty new hotels in China, and we're trying to get it right environmentally," he says. "It's not easy: The Chinese all want three-story atriums, which from an environmental point of view are terribly inefficient." Five years ago, he says, social responsibility wouldn't have been on the agenda of the regional planning meeting he is running off to, but it's an important topic today. "Social responsibility is important to the company, it's important to our shareholders, and it's important to me."

The JW Marriott hotel in Rio de Janeiro might as well be a world away from the nearby slum that Meiriana Silva calls home. The hotel sits on the promenade in front of Copacabana Beach, where on Sundays the beautiful people walk their well-groomed Pekingese and Chihuahuas, and Rio's scantily clad denizens strut their string bikinis and bronzed biceps. On the mountains high above the city are the favelas, sprawling slums that most tourists never see and which can be so violent that even the police hardly dare to enter. Silva's mother, a widow who earns less than two hundred dollars a month as a cleaning lady, can't support her daughter, so for years Silva, twenty, would teach samba and hip-hop to pay for clothes and food. Growing up, she never dreamed of even setting foot in the Marriott, let alone working there.

But the three Marriott properties in Brazil have launched a training program for at-risk kids with Youth Career Initiatives, a London nonprofit that aids underprivileged youth through instruction in the hotel industry. At each property, about ten young people from the favelas participate in a five-month work-training program involving daily instruction—à la Eliza Doolittle—in everything from how to hold a knife and fork to how to dress, speak, peel a potato, and deal with hotel guests. In 2005, Silva signed on; as I sit with her in the hotel lounge, near the soaring atrium, it's difficult to over-estimate the impact of this program.