Tourism and holidaymaking is an enjoyable activity that everyone has at least some experience of, and is generally regarded as a desirable and overall benign phenomenon. However, tourism is posing increasingly intractable issues at both the micro scale – ‘overtourism’ at hyper-popular destinations including Venice and Barcelona, for instance – and also at the macro scale, referring primarily to the environmental impacts of global tourist travel. The projected growth in global numbers of trips clearly has significant impacts for climate change - but no-one wants to mention them! Dr Chris Stone is here to do so, presenting a lively, entertaining, controversial, yet lighthearted talk challenging peoples’ perceptions and attitudes about holidaymaking, and encouraging informed scepticism about tourism as an industry and activity in the twenty-first century.

Chris Stone is a tourism expert, and a university educator with an international perspective and extensive experience of working across academia, government, and the commercial sector. His expertise has been recognised with appointments with the European Commission, European Parliament, and tourism industry professional bodies. He has fifty publications under his belt, and since 2006 has served as an External Examiner for tourism and hospitality management programmes at six university institutions across UK, Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa — and has been invited as tourism expert to countries including Argentina, Spain, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Romania, and others.