Yahnny Adolfo San Luis-Wallgren is a tourism executive who has lived in three countries, travelled to more than fifty, and generated over $45 million in revenue across twenty years — in her own companies and others'. Throughout it all, she has been making one commercial argument: that ethical tourism is more profitable than the alternative.
She runs that argument as a business from Kolmården, Sweden, where she is president and owner of Nomado, a destination management company specialising in luxury active adventure travel. Her husband, Erik Wallgren, founded it in 2003, bringing a special forces background and two decades of work across water, ice, forests, and snow, and he set the principle the company still runs on: prioritise suppliers that are owned and operated by locals, the people who live and breathe the daily culture and understand the depths of its nuances. In practice, that means single-boat captains and two-aisle supply stores, because the most ethical adventure is resident-led and owned, and because luxury tourism should benefit those owners before it benefits anyone else. When Yahnny bought the company in 2020, she rebuilt it to operate remotely through a network of contracted local specialists, so that every trip is staffed by people who live where it goes. Today, Nomado works with travel advisors and outbound tour operators, primarily in the United States.
That work is what put her, in 2026, on Women Leading Travel's Top Women in Travel & Hospitality, a list of twenty leaders profiled worldwide across airlines, hotels, cruise, and destination management.
The conviction behind all of it took shape long before the company did, in South Philadelphia, where Yahnny was raised by an immigrant single mother and learned young that inclusion is something you have to fight for. After a serious car accident, she spent six years relearning to walk, and the woman who came back from that went on to race as a professional triathlete and elite cyclist, a refusal to quit that runs through everything she has built since. For much of her career, she built companies from the ground up for other people, in more than one country, usually as the only person in the room who looked like her, and as a Filipina Polynesian American, she shaped her perspective through a lifetime of entering rooms not designed for her and making her place in them. That perspective is a competitive advantage. She sees markets, communities, and travellers that homogeneous leadership teams overlook, and she builds companies that reach them.