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Oxford provides a fitting backdrop for a larger question facing tourism and the world: What happens to decades of leadership experience when presidents, ministers, CEOs and international officials leave office? Increasingly, the answer is that they keep speaking, teaching, challenging and contributing — only now with a freedom they did not always have while holding an official title.
The name Oxford has long carried a particular weight. Oxford University is synonymous with education, intellectual exchange and prestige, but Oxford is also part of a wider meetings and incentive landscape where conferences, specialist groups and leadership gatherings can combine meeting space with something less tangible: an atmosphere that encourages people to listen, learn and debate.
That makes it an appropriate setting for another increasingly valuable resource — experience.
Around the world, former presidents, prime ministers, ministers, CEOs and leaders of international organizations have accumulated decades of knowledge that does not suddenly become irrelevant when their official mandate ends.
Some may be ready for retirement. Others clearly are not.
Leaders who approached their work with genuine passion often have little interest in simply going home to enjoy the swimming pool. Freed from official policy, diplomatic protocol, corporate messaging and the political necessities of office, some discover a different kind of influence.
They can teach. They can mentor. They can challenge today’s leaders. And sometimes they can say publicly what they could not say while they were still in office.
Tourism leaders don’t necessarily retire
The tourism sector offers several examples.
Francesco Frangialli, the former Secretary-General of the UN World Tourism Organization, remains a recognizable figure whose experience spans decades of transformation in international tourism.
Professor Geoffrey Lipman has followed an equally interesting post-office path. The former CEO of the World Travel & Tourism Council and former Deputy Secretary-General of UNWTO has increasingly focused his energy on climate change, education and the next generation through SUNx Malta.
Rather than walking away from tourism, Lipman has used his experience to challenge the industry he helped shape, particularly on one of its most difficult questions: how can travel continue to grow in a world facing an accelerating climate crisis?
Then there is Alain St.Ange, the former Seychelles Minister responsible for Tourism and Culture.
St.Ange has always understood the relationship between tourism and the media. As minister, he launched the Friends of the Media initiative and became known internationally as an accessible tourism personality. Leaving ministerial office did not end that relationship with the public stage.
Quite the opposite.
He continues to accept opportunities to speak, teach and share the lessons of an industry he knows, follows and clearly still loves.
His latest appearance in Oxford demonstrates why the accumulated knowledge of former leaders can be useful well beyond their years in office.
What if tourism is actually diplomacy?
Speaking at the Oxford Global Diplomat Summit & Dialogue at the Lord Mayor’s Cabinet Office, in the presence of the Lord Mayor of Oxford, Ambassador Dr. Alain St.Ange addressed delegates on the theme “Tourism as a Bridge Between Nations.”
He began with a deceptively simple question:
What if some of the most powerful diplomacy of our time happens not in an embassy or around a negotiating table, but over a shared meal?
It is an intriguing way of looking at an industry that governments frequently measure through visitor arrivals, hotel occupancy, airline seats, employment and foreign-exchange earnings.
Those numbers matter enormously. St.Ange pointed to forecasts indicating that travel and tourism in 2026 will contribute around $12 trillion to the global economy and support roughly 376 million jobs.
But his argument was that the industry’s true impact cannot be captured on a spreadsheet.
Every international arrival represents a human being crossing a border. Every journey creates the possibility of encountering another culture, another way of life and another perspective.
And occasionally it challenges a prejudice.
There is, after all, a significant difference between knowing about a country and knowing some of the people who live there.
A destination stops being merely a place on a map when it becomes associated with the taxi driver who talked about his children, the restaurant owner who explained a local tradition, the musician encountered in a village or the family who welcomed a stranger to their table.
This, St.Ange argued, is cultural diplomacy from the bottom up.
Governments can tell their citizens that other nations should be understood. Tourism allows people to discover that understanding themselves.
An airline route can become much more than an airline route
The same principle applies to connectivity.
Tourism depends on air routes, maritime connections, roads and increasingly sophisticated digital infrastructure. Yet infrastructure built to move visitors inevitably moves much more.
It connects businesses with markets, families with each other and students with universities.
A new flight might begin because sufficient tourism demand exists between two destinations. But the person occupying one of those seats today as a holidaymaker might return tomorrow as an investor.
A student can return as a researcher. A conference delegate can become a business partner. A visitor can become an ambassador for a destination without ever receiving a diplomatic title.
Seen this way, connectivity created through tourism can become economic, educational and cultural infrastructure.
For small island economies such as Seychelles, this is particularly important because tourism reaches far beyond hotels.
Its economic chain includes taxi drivers, fishermen supplying restaurants, farmers, musicians, guides, craftspeople, entrepreneurs and families operating small guesthouses.
That raises a harder question.
Who actually benefits?
For decades, destinations have celebrated ever-increasing arrival figures. One million visitors become two million; two million become three.
But St.Ange’s address challenged the industry to ask better questions.
How much of the value generated by those visitors remains in the destination? How many locally owned companies participate in the tourism economy? Are young people finding meaningful careers? Is local culture becoming stronger because of tourism, or merely being packaged for tourists?
These questions matter because tourism has a peculiar vulnerability.
The industry depends on precisely the things it can damage.
Beaches, oceans, coral reefs, forests, wildlife, historic neighborhoods, cultural traditions and functioning communities attract visitors. Overdevelopment can then place those same assets under extraordinary pressure.
St.Ange captured that contradiction particularly effectively:
“A hotel can be built in a few years. A coral reef takes generations to develop. A tourist can leave tomorrow. The community remains.”
It is difficult to find a simpler explanation of why tourism policy cannot be built around arrivals alone.
Sustainability is not the enemy of growth
The old argument that destinations must choose between environmental protection and economic development is also becoming increasingly difficult to defend.
For a tourism economy, protecting nature is economic policy.
- Climate resilience is economic policy.
- Clean beaches are economic policy.
- Healthy oceans are economic policy.
And ensuring that residents continue to support tourism is economic policy.
The objective, therefore, should not simply be to attract more tourists. It should be to generate greater value with less pressure— through cleaner energy, better transportation, waste reduction, biodiversity protection and development appropriate to the environmental limits of a destination.
Social sustainability is just as important.
Residents cannot become spectators watching an industry operate around them. They need opportunities to become employees, managers, entrepreneurs, owners and decision-makers.
Culture presents a similar challenge. Traditions may be enormously attractive to visitors, but they do not exist primarily for visitors. Culture belongs first to the people who live it.
The danger of making everywhere look the same
Perhaps one of the most interesting ideas in St.Ange’s Oxford address concerned something tourism rarely measures: sameness.
Globalization has made travel easier, but it has also made it remarkably easy for destinations to imitate each other.
Hotels begin to look alike. Shopping streets contain the same international brands. Restaurants follow the same concepts. Architecture is imported. Experiences are standardized.
The paradox is obvious.
Why travel thousands of kilometres to discover what you could have experienced at home?
As St.Ange put it, people generally do not cross oceans to find exactly what they left behind.
The more connected the world becomes, therefore, the more economically and culturally valuable authentic difference may become.
Successful destinations of the future may not be those that copy global tourism most efficiently, but those confident enough to remain unmistakably themselves.
Experience after office
This brings the discussion back to Oxford — and to the role of former leaders.
There is considerable value in bringing people who have governed countries, led ministries, managed international organizations and directed major companies into universities, conferences, leadership forums and industry meetings.
They have made decisions when circumstances were uncertain. They have seen policies succeed and fail. They understand the gap between an attractive strategy on paper and the political, financial and human realities of implementing it.
Most importantly, once outside office, they can sometimes examine their own industries with greater independence.
That is why figures such as Frangialli, Lipman and St.Ange remain relevant.
Their greatest contribution after leaving office may not be to repeat what they accomplished while holding their former titles. It may be to transfer what they learned to those who hold responsibility today — and to the younger generation that will hold it tomorrow.
Universities and prestigious meeting destinations such as Oxford can play an important role in making that transfer happen.
It also presents an opportunity for the meetings and incentive industry. A conference does not need to be only a gathering of today’s officeholders. Combining active leaders with former decision-makers, academics, students, entrepreneurs and young professionals can turn an event into something closer to a living classroom.
Tourism as a classroom without walls
St.Ange ended his Oxford address by returning to the idea of tourism as something much larger than an industry.
Tourism moves money, certainly.
But it also moves ideas.
It moves traditions, food, music, knowledge, investment, friendships and stories. It exposes people to differences that political rhetoric can make seem frightening from a distance but remarkably ordinary when encountered face to face.
That does not mean tourism automatically creates peace, nor that travel can solve geopolitical conflicts. But it does create millions of small opportunities for human contact across borders.
In a world in which societies are frequently encouraged to retreat into competing camps, there is something powerful about an activity built around doing exactly the opposite: leaving home and entering someone else’s world.
The challenge is to ensure that this movement generates prosperity without destroying the resources on which prosperity depends; that it connects economies without erasing cultures; and that it opens destinations to visitors without asking those destinations to surrender their identity.
St.Ange summarized that ambition with words that deserve to travel beyond the room in Oxford:
“Tourism becomes much more than travel. It becomes diplomacy without a negotiating table. Education without a classroom. Trade with a human face. And ultimately, a bridge between nations — carrying not only travelers, but understanding, opportunity and hope.”
Perhaps there is another lesson in Oxford as well. Leadership does not necessarily end when the title disappears.
For those who still have something worth saying — and the passion to say it — leaving office can simply mean moving from making policy to sharing experience.
And in a complicated world searching for both new ideas and lessons from the past, that experience may be far too valuable to retire.
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