About us? It's difficult to know what to say. My tourism consultant associates have their own page so I don't think I should tell you any more about them, perhaps, therefore, I should tell you about me.
My career started in the hospitality industry working for Vaux Breweries in the managed house division. Here I learned food and beverage management and gained from some interesting experiences including a spell in charge of the Marsden Grotto in Whitburn, a pub and restaurant on the beach. After a few years I moved into hotel management, mostly working for independent companies in England and Scotland. As the hair line started to recede and with the realisation that my children were growing up whilst I was at work, I left the industry and became a consultant trainer with the Hotel Catering Training Company. This led to a move into economic development with Scottish Enterprise and I worked both in Glasgow and then in Dunbartonshire as Head of Tourism Development.
In 1999 I left Scotland, and with it gainful employment, to start up a tourism consulting business and Tourism UK was formed. I had by this point developed a passion for tourism, so to create a business that would mean I had to spend all of my working time studying the subject, seemed rather like not working at all!
In my spare time (spare...now there's an interesting word) I sing with the Ampleforth & Ryedale Concert choir, this year we sang Brahms Requiem and last year Vivaldi's Gloria. I was a member of the North East HLF committee for 5 years and was a board member on the tourism advisory board for the North East Regional Development Agency. I play golf badly (though I did break 90 last summer) and I also play guitar; neither of which I practice enough to be very good, but they give me pleasure anyway.
My strengths? Well people tell me that I am a strategic thinker, personally I think its just that my brain gets easily confused so I need to try and think things through one step at a time. I think I am a pragamatist, in that I think theories are good, but only if I can do something with them. What I try hard to do is to work with the client to ensure that Tourism UK provides usable solutions rather than just reports. What I aim to do is to provide another perspective.
Kevin Kaley FTS, MIH