Dr. Brian White is the Director of the School of Tourism and Hospitality Management within the Faculty of Management at Royal Roads University. Previously Dr. White was senior faculty member and Coordinator for the Bachelor of Tourism Management Degree Program at Capilano University (formerly Capilano College), Vancouver, British Columbia.
Dr. White holds a PhD in Human Geography from Simon Fraser University. After completing his MA at SFU, he founded the Outdoor Recreation Management department at Capilano College in 1972 and the Tourism Management department in 1986. In November 2004 he was honored as the Canadian tourism industry’s ‘Educator of the Year’ at the annual Pinnacle Awards in Toronto, hosted by Hotelier magazine.
Dr. White's recent consulting work in British Columbia has included community tourism strategic planning, museum organizational restructuring, human resource development for tourism, cultural and arts-based tourism development planning, and First Nations eco-tourism planning. Recent international consulting and lecturing experience include human resource policy and planning, community capacity-building, cultural tourism, and eco-tourism initiatives. He also developed the tourism labour force policy for the World Travel and Tourism Council, where he was the senior human resource policy advisor from 1997 to 2001. Consulting contracts with a variety of clients and funding agencies have been successfully undertaken in Vietnam, Bulgaria, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Guam, Thailand, and Costa Rica. He is regularly invited to present at international conferences and seminars, and uses his extensive consulting and research experience to enrich his lectures and workshops. In 1988 he developed the Whistler Spirit Program, which is still the key customer service training program at Whistler.
Dr. White's teaching specialties include heritage and cultural tourism, tourism and outdoor recreation geography, tourism human resource management and planning, organizational leadership, eco-tourism, environmental and cultural stewardship for tourism, and sustainable tourism policy and planning. For the 16 years he has taught Cultural Tourism Planning at the University of Victoria, and he also taught Tourism Geography at Simon Fraser University and Strategic Tourism Management for the University of Brighton. In the early 1990s, he wrote the BC Tourism Learning System, and subsequently developed the Bachelor of Tourism Management Degree for British Columbia.
An avid outdoorsman, photographer, horticulturalist, and naturalist, he has led ocean kayaking, hiking, and mountaineering expeditions for over thirty-five years. He is presently engaged in plant explorations and national park planning in northern Vietnam.