Speaking & Facilitation
I speak and facilitate at international tourism conferences, leadership summits and high-level gatherings on the future of destinations and place.
The conversations happening in tourism leadership right now are among the most consequential of our time.
How do destinations navigate the space between growth and stewardship? How do leaders hold direction when the old frameworks no longer fit and the new ones are not yet embedded? What does it actually mean to lead a place, not just manage a visitor economy?
These are the questions I bring to every stage, every panel and every room.
My role is not to provide answers. It is to sharpen the questions and to create the conditions in which leaders can think more clearly about what their places actually need.
"The question for leadership is no longer how to grow tourism.
It is how to grow the places that make tourism possible."
Keynote Speaking
I open conversations that need opening - about the future of destinations, the evolving mandate of place leadership, and the shift from The Numbers Paradigm to The Place Paradigm.
My keynotes are not motivational. They are intellectual. They give senior audiences a new lens, a shared language and a clearer framework for the decisions they face.
Every keynote is built around the ideas in The Place Paradigm, but delivered in a way that meets leaders where they are, in the specific tensions of their place and their moment.
Panel Facilitation & Moderation
I have facilitated and moderated panels at some of the world's leading tourism events, including the World Travel Market in London in both 2024 and 2025.
What I bring to facilitation is the same thing I bring to all my leadership work - the ability to hold complexity without simplifying it, to draw out what is not being said, and to move a conversation toward something useful without forcing it.
For conference organisers who want panels that go somewhere, rather than panels that merely cover ground.
Facilitated Leadership Conversations
Beyond the conference stage, I design and lead facilitated conversations for leadership teams, cross-agency partnerships and sector gatherings navigating specific place-based challenges.
These are not workshops. They are structured thinking spaces, designed for senior leaders who need to move beyond information exchange and into genuine alignment.
Selected Speaking & Facilitation
- TEDx Galway | Tourism On the Line, 2021 Watch the Talk →
- World Travel Market, London | Panel Facilitation & Moderation, 2024 & 2025
Further engagements available on request.
"Now is the time to question whether what has served us well in the past can continue to serve us well in the future."
- TEDx Galway, 2021
The conversations I'm most often invited to lead:
- The shift from The Numbers Paradigm to The Place Paradigm | what it means for destinations, for leadership and for measurement.
- The Metrics-Mandate Gap | why tourism leaders feel the tension between their dashboards and their actual mandate, and what to do about it.
- The Navigator Leader | leading destinations through the space between paradigms.
- The Five Dimensions of Place Vitality | a new framework for understanding destination health beyond visitor numbers.
- Regenerative tourism | what it actually means in practice, beyond the language.
- The future of place stewardship | governance, systems thinking and the generational responsibility of destination leadership.
Speaking Enquiries
If you are considering inviting me to speak, facilitate or moderate, the best starting point is a brief conversation, about the place, the audience and the questions that matter most in that moment.
Get in Touch →