During my career I was always driven to find solutions to one question: How to make destinations, especially protected areas more sustainable?Coming from the tourism sector, I first worked in the hotel industry and later as a tour guide and product developer for Wikinger Reisen GmbH in Canada, Italy, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Georgia. I helped to establish the branch office and network of the European Centre for Eco-Agro Tourism (ECEAT) in Germany supporting eco-farmers in developing and marketing offers on Holidays on Farms. Early in my career I realised that it is important making an effort to influence policy makers to put the right frameworks to sustainable tourism. Together with the NGO Ecological Tourism in Europe (ETE), I contributed to the drafting, negotiating and finally adopting of the International Guidelines for Biodiversity and Tourism Development for the Convention on Biological Diversity with its 192 member states. Since I am working continuously in Central Europe for about 25 years, a logical step for me was to support through ETE the Framework Convention for the Protection and Sustainable Development of the Carpathians. I was happy to give advice to its 7 member states and a wide range of stakeholders to elaborate and adopt the Protocol on Sustainable Tourism and later on facilitated the process to elaborate and adopt the Strategy for Sustainable Tourism Development of the Carpathians. In parallel to this policy work I am focussing intensively at the local level managing and implementing projects on sustainable tourism development, with special emphasis on capacity building of stakeholders and touristic product development in and around protected areas. My work brought me to the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Romania, Serbia, Georgia and especially Slovakia where I am working almost without interruption for the last 23 years, but also to Indonesia and Thailand where I worked 8 years for the UNWTO on the same topic.