Associates

Todd Comen is the Director of The Institute For Integrated Rural Tourism and an Professor of Business and Hospitality Management at Johnson State College in Vermont. Professor Comen earned a Master's Degree from Cornell University in Hotel Administration and a Bachelor's Degree in Economics from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. His love for rural tourism began in 1982 with the development and operation of a small country inn on a farm in northern California. His experience in creating an agricultural tourist attraction at The Apple Works in Wisconsin and years of living on small farms raising crops and small farm animals, has given Professor Comen a keen sense of emerging opportunities for reinventing rural economies, invigorating rural cultures, and for weaving natural area protection into an overall rural tourism strategy.

Since 1989, Todd Comen has combined research and the study of tourism and hospitality with his practical experience in operations to bring a non-traditional approach to consulting, workshops and courses on hospitality and tourism management. Courses and workshops cover a variety of topics relevant to rural and ecotourism including rural tourism product and infrastructure planning and development, marketing, ecotourism, and quality management of hospitality organizations.

Recent research and workshop engagements have taken him to the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Romania, Poland, Belarus, Honduras and Italy. He has worked with a variety of NGO’s as a tourism consultant including CHF International, Partners of the Americas and The Institute For Sustainable Communities. Professor Comen has developed a new strategy for rural economic development and poverty alleviation called Integrated Rural Tourism. His Institute for Integrated Rural Tourism offers leadership, research, consulting and educational programming to people interested in weaving low impact tourism into the economy of their community.