Ben is Head of Strategic Communications at the Travel Foundation, a sustainable tourism charity based in the UK, which works with businesses and destinations across the globe to improve tourism’s impacts.
He has been at the Travel Foundation for over 9 years and has been involved in projects such as developing the influential “Destinations at Risk: The Invisible Burden of Tourism” report in 2019, and setting up the Future of Tourism Coalition in 2020 where he chairs the communications working group. He co-authored the report Towards Destination Stewardship which was published by the World Travel and Tourism Council last year, and was also part of the team that drafted the Glasgow Declaration on Climate Action in Tourism launched by the UN World Tourism Organisation at COP26 in Glasgow, which is supporting destinations and businesses to halve tourism’s global carbon footprint by 2030.
In our discussion, Ben discusses the structures that are making tourism weaker and why digitalisation will play an important part in its future.