This is a good topic to discuss, Kevin.
There are a lot of heavily trafficked sites who opt not to use AdSense. Some people make a lot more money by selling ad space directly to advertisers. I noticed that forum on that site is heavily trafficked and with travel being such a hot niche, the owner probably makes a killing from the banner ads at the top of the forum.
I know Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net stopped using AdSense and his site and it gets thousands of visitors per day. One of this reasons was his audience. Since he attracts mostly webmasters, they tend to be more aware of Google ads and ignore them. So his CTR was low. He figured he could make more money from selling ad space and his experiment proved this was indeed true.
He also said he was able to reel in some bigger-named advertisers without AdSense because they told him they believe AdSense cheapens a site.
Now, me personally, if I owned that travel forum/site I'd definitely use AdSense at least in some capacity, but I've heard about a lot of people who choose not to for various reasons.
And to answer your other question about how did this person get so popular. This webmaster could also have another heavily trafficked travel-related site he used to promote the forum and that helped make it popular.
I seriously doubt that forum became popular by just creating a stand-alone forum... unless the owner had a bunch of money to shell out on paid advertising to get it off the ground.
Interesting discussion, though. I'd love to hear other people's take on this.
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