When we travel, it's the human connection that stays with us.

I came to tourism from television production, which sounds like an unusual pivot until you consider that both are fundamentally about stories and why people pay attention to them. In 2020, I moved to Paris to make the change full-time — though the pull toward tourism had been building for years, through summers spent doing development and marketing work in between television seasons.

The first real chapter was three months in Rwanda, helping a hotel and restaurant launch their tour company. Then vineyards in France. Those early projects led to others, and alongside a master's in the management of international tourism at the Sorbonne — where I now contribute as a guest lecturer — and a thesis on coffee tourism in Uganda, Passport Creative took shape.

The work has since taken me across South America, Africa, and Asia. The destinations change; the underlying question stays the same: how do you support the people who make travel meaningful — the guides, the community operators, the destination managers — in a way that actually lasts?

That question is where the intelligence focus comes from. Early in my career I saw what happens when projects become dependent on external investment and external expertise — the support ends, and not much remains. I wanted to do something different: to be genuinely useful, to provide research and training that guides real decisions, but to be able to leave knowing that the people we worked with can carry it forward without us.

The intelligence we produce — visitor sentiment, market segmentation, digital audits, operator landscapes — is a means to that end. The goal isn't a report. It's a destination that knows which markets to pursue and why, or an operator who understands their customers well enough to make better decisions next season.

I've also learned, from experience on both sides of consultancy relationships, that the projects that succeed are the ones where both parties show up. We work hard for our clients — but we need emails answered, meetings attended, and ideas pushed back on. That kind of engagement is the best predictor of a project that actually goes somewhere.