Albert Postma

Background

About Albert Postma

Dr. Albert Postma (1962) is professor of applied sciences in transformative foresight at NHL Stenden University, European Tourism Futures Institute He has a background in Social Geography and did his BSc, MSc and PhD at the University of Groningen, faculty of Spatial Sciences. He started his career as a project coordinator at the municipality of Leeuwarden. After a few years he moved to NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences (fka CHN North Netherlands and Stenden, respectively) where he has been teaching research methodology, destination marketing, sustainable tourism and quality of life. In the meantime he has been leading the MA International Leisure and Tourism Studies for 10 years and achieved a PhD degree after a study of tourism community relations and residents' tipping points in tolerance and acceptance towards tourism (“When the tourists flew in”; critical encounters in the development of tourism, 2013). Postma has been involved in applied research for the leisure and tourism industry since the early 1990s, initially mainly in the marketing of cities and regions, and in monitoring and evaluation. A milestone has been the initiation of Toerdata Noord, a monitoring system for supply and demand of tourism, commissioned by the three northern provinces of the Netherlands, which has run succesfully for almost 15 years. Since 2014 he has applied the outcomes of his PhD thesis in several overtourism studies, partly in collaboration with UN World Tourism Organization. In 2010 Postma was appointed professor in scenario planning at the European Tourism Futures Institute, Academy of Leisure & Tourism at NHL Stenden University. In this position he has been responsible for foresight education at the Academy, for the research programme of the research group, and for various future related projects for the leisure and tourism industry in the Netherlands and beyond. Nationally and internationally, Postma is frequently invited to provide keynote presentations at industry conferences, and to give creative workshop sessions to representatives of the sector. He is co-editor of the book The Future of European Tourism and the Journal of Tourism Futures. He authored the book Scenario Planning and Tourism Futures together with Stefan Hartman and Ian Yeoman, which was published December 2024. Since 2010 his focus has evolved from scenario planning, along foresight, strategic foresight to transformative foresight on leisure, tourism and hospitality by the end of 2024, with the aim to contribute to improving quality of life locally and regionally.