Samantha Hogenson Bray is the Managing Director of the Center for Responsible Travel (CREST) and has been with the organization since 2013. Samantha provides administrative management, project management, and consulting expertise for CREST’s global sustainable tourism projects. She is a strong advocate for sustaining and enhancing our world’s cultures and environments through travel and using tourism as a mechanism for community empowerment. Samantha’s key areas of expertise are impact tourism, overtourism, and holistic destination management and stewardship.
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 training and conferences in the Caribbean, to editing several of CREST’s books. Samantha was fortunate to spend her first several years at CREST working directly with Co-Founder Dr. Martha Honey and continues to build on the base Martha built advocating for academic rigor and practical application in the study of tourism. Samantha is a leader in the newly formed global Future of Tourism Coalition, an advisor for the DC-based Destination Stewardship Center, and a trained Climate Reality Leader.
Samantha was one of 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.