Samantha Hogenson Bray

Samantha Hogenson Bray is the principal of Seamless Sustainability and a PhD student at the University of Waterloo, whose consulting work and research focus on holistic destination stewardship through public, private, and civil sector collaboration. Samantha’s key areas of expertise are stakeholder engagement, sustainable destination management, community-based tourism, impact tourism, placemaking, and destination and business climate action. She is an advocate for sustaining and enhancing our world’s cultures and environments through travel and channeling tourism as a mechanism for community wellbeing and empowerment.

Prior to beginning her PhD, Samantha was the managing director of the Center for Responsible Travel (CREST), where she provided administration, project management, and consulting expertise for CREST’s global portfolio. Samantha’s work has ranged from developing community-based tourism efforts in rural Michigan, to contributing to cultural-heritage tourism development in Ethiopia, to conducting climate change and tourism trainings and conferences in the Caribbean, to editing several of CREST’s books. Samantha is an advisor for the Destination Stewardship Center, sits on the Impartiality Committee of Preferred by Nature, is a trained Climate Reality Leader, and was the founding Vice Chair of the Future of Tourism Coalition.

Samantha was among the first students of geotourism through her undergraduate program at Missouri State University and holds a Master of Tourism Administration with a concentration in Sustainable Destination Management from The George Washington University.