Greg Richards is Professor of Leisure Studies at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He has extensive experience in tourism research and education, with previous posts at London Metropolitan University (UK), Universitat Roviria I Virgili, Tarragona (Spain) and the University of the West of England (Bristol, UK). He was also a European Union Marie Curie Fellow at the Interarts Foundation in Barcelona.
He is a European Executive Member of the Association for Tourism and Leisure Education (ATLAS) and has directed a number of ATLAS projects for the European Commission on topics including cultural tourism, crafts tourism, sustainable tourism, tourism education and labour mobility in the tourism industry. He has also worked extensively on the analysis and development of cultural and creative tourism in cities such as Barcelona (ES), London, Newcastle, Manchester and Edinburgh (UK) Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Den Bosch (NL), Sibiu (RO), Amman (Jordan) and Macau (China). His major publications include Cultural Tourism in Europe (1996); Cultural Attractions and European Tourism (2001); Tourism and Gastronomy (2002); The Global Nomad: Backpacker Travel in Theory and Practice (2004); Cultural Tourism - Global and Local Perspectives (2007) and Tourism, Creativity and Development (2007).
He was a member of the Palmer/Rae team evaluating the impact of the European Cities of Culture (ECOC) for the European Commission, an international jury member for the selection of the Hungarian Capital of Culture in 2010, a contributor to the European Travel Commission study of City Tourism and Culture and an adviser on the development of national cultural tourism policy in Austria. He has advised the Dutch city of Den Bosch on the development of multi-annual cultural events programme to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the painter Hieronymus Bosch. In 2007 he conducted the evaluation research for both of the ECOC - Luxemburg and Sibiu (Romania), and he is conducting long term-evaluation of the cultural, economic and social impacts of the Sibiu event. He also recently advised Stavanger 2008 on the production of the final evaluation report for the 2008 ECOC and is now helping develop the ECOC concept for BrabantStad - an as-yet fairly unknown 'new metropolis' in the Netherlands.
