Who runs Signalword

In 2001 I co-wrote an eighty page report for the UK government on whale watching in West Scotland. Who the tourists were. What they understood about the animals. What the industry was worth to the rural economy. The work went on to appear in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Current Issues in Tourism, the Journal of Ecotourism and Aquatic Conservation, and two papers went to the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission.

Before and after that it was expeditions. Fin fish and mangroves and tortoises in southwest Madagascar with Frontier, coral reefs in the Mexican Caribbean, Tanzania and Zambia, some of it grant funded and some of it paid for out of my own pocket. An MSc in Environmental Sustainability and a zoology degree from Edinburgh came before all of it.

I bring it up for one reason. Peer review teaches you a habit that marketing does not: a number you cannot reproduce is not a finding. Somebody is going to ask how you got it, and "the script said so" is not an answer.

That is why Signalword publishes its method, states its sample dates, and says what it excluded and why.

Global Vision International, 2003 to 2017. I started leading research expeditions on the Mexican Caribbean reef and finished as Director of Business Development, responsible for sales operations across five countries, and for the network of agents, universities and educational partners behind them. I also built GVI's Charitable Trust from nothing and ran it for five years.

AFS Intercultural Programs, 2017 to 2020. Business development across a network of non-profits in more than sixty countries, and Acting General Manager of Sentio.

The Forum on Education Abroad, 2020 to now. Consultant Chief Revenue Officer. Membership, sponsorship, conferences, a full database migration, a new website, and leading The Forum's adoption of AI.

So when this site says it keeps a written library of the twenty questions a parent actually asks before booking a gap year, or a family before a first safari, that library is not generated. It is written by someone who has answered those questions on the phone.

Signalword is run by HEZA Consulting, which I founded in 2019 and which does sales training, coaching and commercial strategy for travel and education businesses. That work has included:

I have also coached a cohort through the Entrepreneurs' Organization Accelerator 2IC programme, and co-founded Travolucion, a platform for experiential and educational travel.

I mention these things because through my extensive personal experience, combined with the knowledge gained from Travolucion and the clients I have worked with directly, I know intimately which questions potential travellers ask.

• WYSE Work and Volunteer Abroad, Advisory Committee
• World Youth Student Executive, Volunteer Working Group, Chair
• VolSA, part of the South Africa Youth Tourism Commission, Board member
• Year Out Group, Membership Committee
• GVI Charitable Trust, Trustee
• Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and of the Zoological Society of London

I have written for the UNWTO and WYSE Travel Confederation's Global Report on the power of youth travel, edited two WYSE research volumes on the impact of volunteer travel and contributed to The International Ecotourism Society's Voluntourism Guidelines.

Leading an organisation's adoption of AI means asking what these systems actually say about you. So I asked. The answers named competitors, named companies that no longer trade, and in some cases named nobody at all. When I went looking for the technical reason, I found something I did not expect: sites whose robots.txt openly invited an AI crawler, and whose servers turned that same crawler away at the door. The permission was public. The refusal was silent. It appeared in no browser, no Search Console report and no analytics package.

Nobody had chosen it. It was a setting, switched on during a migration, by someone who had no idea it would decide whether a business appeared in a recommendation.

So I started counting. The count is still running.

Every figure on this site is traceable to a published method, with its sample date and its exclusions stated.

The free check is run by a person. Your real site, no account, no card, no automated sequence afterwards.