James Cresswell, the director of GeoWorld Travel, set up his geological tourism company over ten years ago. The vision was to offer multi-day trips to various destinations around the world to visit and enjoy the world’s best geological sites. Starting with a tour around Wales in 2013, the company now offers tours to fifteen different countries and the most popular tours sell out as much as 18 months in advance. James researches and devises the itineraries, and guides the majority of trips himself.  

James will give an talk about how he set up his company and about the many different countries that he offers tours to. Some geological destinations are mainstream tourist destinations, but others are well away from the beaten track. As a keen photographer, James has an extensive photographic library of his travels and he will use these images to illustrate the itineraries that he has devised and explain what makes a location interesting to a geologist.

Speaker biography

James’s background is in geology and travel. Having  gained a BSc degree in Geology from the University of Bristol, and an MSc in Oceanography from the University of Southampton, James worked as a television researcher, including work on the original BBC Blue Planet series. After this, he took the opportunity to join an expedition cruise ship to the Antarctic as a videographer. Once he had completed a few voyages, he became the ship’s geologist, giving lectures to passengers on geology and guiding them on shore visits during the cruises.

Over the next decade, James was fortunate enough to visit not only Antarctica another thirty plus times, but also worked on many expedition cruises to the Arctic, reaching the North Pole on no less than six separate occasions! Through personal travel and other expedition guiding work, he had managed to visit 100 different countries by the time he reached thirty. It was therefore a logical step to combine his passions for geology and travel – hence James created GeoWorld Travel.

He lives in Gilwern, near Abergavenny.

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