What makes Jeremy Sampson a Global Shaker?
Jeremy Sampson is Chief Executive Officer at The Travel Foundation, working with travel companies and destinations to better understand the impacts of tourism and maximise benefits for local people and the environment.
The Foundation offers training, stakeholder engagement, research, project design, expert advice and guidance, and works on environmental protection and marine conservation in Saint Lucia; reducing single-use plastics in Cyprus; and related projects in Tenerife, Turkey and Jamaica.
Sampson has led the organisation and been its public face since 2019.
This follows a varied career inherently focused on responsible travel. From 2011 until 2015 he worked at Sustainable Travel International (STI), first as Senior Director of Marketing and Communications and later as Vice President of Partnerships and Operations.
He was then President at luxury eco-travel operator GreenSpot Travel, from 2015-17. Concurrently he began a role as Adjunct Professor at the International Institute of Tourism Studies at George Washington University School of Business, where he ran courses on Sustainable Destination Management; Regional Sustainable Tourism Initiatives as Conservation Change Agents.
This was followed by a role as Ecosystem Programme Communications Officer for the IUCN Centre for Mediterranean Cooperation, with a special focus on sustainable travel and ecotourism. Here he launched the MEET Network, a regional-scale ecotourism network and destination management organisation for protected areas across the Med.
Under Sampson’s leadership The Travel Foundation has become one of the six members of the Future of Travel Coalition, alongside Sustainable Travel International, Tourism Cares, CREST, Destination Stewardship Centre, and Green Destinations.
“Several months ago, before the pandemic hit, we started having some discussions bilaterally about what it would mean for us to start collaborating more meaningfully.” Jeremy Sampson explained in an webcast with Travel Weekly.
“When the COVID crisis hit it lit a fire under us and we accelerated these efforts because we felt it was more important than ever, when there’s a lot of dialogue about where tourism is going and how we will recover from this pandemic. It was a really important moment to come together around some key messages and a platform for what we felt recovery needed to look like.”
Sampson holds a degree in Mass Communications from the University of Berkley, California, and has spent time on the Destination Stewardship Working Group for GSTC, The Global Sustainable Tourism Council (See Randy Durban profile).
Tags: Sustainable Travel, The Travel Foundation, tourism, UK
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