Professor Terry Stevens
Founder and Managing Director, Stevens & Associates;
Professor of International Dynamic Destinations, School of Management, Swansea University
Professor Terry Stevens is Founder and MD of the multi-award winning, international, tourism consultancy, Stevens & Associates. This Wales-based consultancy has now worked in over 50 countries around the world specializing in destination development, marketing, and place-making. He has worked in the industry since 1970 holding a number of senior positions in the public and private sectors prior to establishing his consultancy. This included time with the Wales Tourist Board, The US National Parks Service, Welsh Historic Monuments and the Coke Estate.
Stevens & Associates clients include many of the major international development agencies (including the UN World Tourism Organisation, UNESCO, The World Bank, European Bank of Reconstruction, European Investment Bank, The UK Department for International Development and USAID) as well as national, regional and city governments. The private sector client has included Coca Cola, The Buccleuch Group (Britain’s largest private land owner), The Duke of Devonshire, Scottish Racing, the Welsh Rugby Union, The European Arenas Association and many other blue-chip companies.
Terry is currently working on strategic destination development projects in New Zealand (for the community of Rotorua), Trinidad & Tobago, Ireland, Northern Ireland and in Scotland. Over recent years he has worked closely with the cities of Belfast (N. Ireland), Galway (Ireland), Cardiff and Swansea (Wales) and Linz (Austria). In total Terry has overseen some 350 destination development projects over the last 26 years.
In 2004 / 2005 he was commissioned to undertake a series of international best practice and benchmarking studies for the Scottish Government, including a review of the world’s best mountain destinations. This work was transformative in its impact on the way tourism has subsequently been organized across Great Britain. This led to further destination benchmarking of well-being/wellness destinations; post-industrial port cities; national park destinations and small/medium cities. At the heart of this work is a destination comparator model developed by S&A in conjunction with the University of Calgary.
Terry is and has been Visiting Professor at a number of Universities including Reading, the Dundee Business School, Granada (Spain), NHTV (Holland), Krems and MODULE (Austria), Cardiff Metropolitan and the Centre of Culture in Barcelona. He has also taught at Texas A&M and Ohio Sate Universities. In September 2015, he was invited to join the School of Management at Swansea University on an advisory basis to establish ‘International Dynamic Destinations’ – a new global knowledge sharing initiative.
He has been Vice Chair (Strategy) of the Wales Tourist Board and is a regular keynote speaker at global and international summits, including, most recently: The UNWTO Global Ministerial Summit on Sports Tourism in Sochi and Moscow; the Global Wellness Summits in Istanbul and Morocco; the Global Stadia Business Summits in Dublin, Barcelona and Madrid and the Advances in Destination Management Summit in Vail. He has written extensively on the subject of tourism development (over 300 books and chapters in books as well as articles in magazines and journals). His new book: “LANDSCAPE WALES” was published in April 2016 and he is now writing a book on great destinations of the world.