Kingston Khoo

Activist, Brainstormer, Business leader, Business mentor, Change Agent, Consultant, Educator/Teacher, Entrepreneur, Explorer, Life mentor, Marketer, Social entrepreneur, Startup, World traveler

Kingston Khoo is a tourism and sustainability practitioner with over 24 years of experience across tourism, hospitality, destination development and sustainable tourism. He is the Founder and President of Eco-STEPS Malaysia, CEO and Founder of Dusky Leaf Adventures, and Founder of Mind Mingle Mentor Services. A licensed Malaysian tourist guide and an authorised GSTC Lead Trainer, Kingston works with tourism businesses, communities and destinations to turn sustainability from a concept into practical action. His work spans sustainable tourism training, ESG, responsible travel, community-based tourism and nature conservation. Through Eco-STEPS Malaysia, he champions initiatives that connect tourism with environmental protection and community empowerment. Through Dusky Leaf Adventures, he creates meaningful, locally rooted experiences that encourage travellers to discover the lesser-known stories, people and places of Malaysia. Kingston believes tourism should not simply take people to places...it should help those places thrive!

I'm passionate about making sustainability practical. I believe sustainability should not be something reserved for large corporations, expensive consultants or beautifully written reports. It should be something that every hotel, tour operator, destination and community can understand, afford and act upon. I'm equally passionate about tourism's ability to connect travellers with communities, businesses with nature, and economic opportunities with conservation. Much of my work sits at that intersection. Whether I am training a hotel team on sustainability, helping a tourism business understand GSTC standards, developing community-based experiences or working on conservation initiatives, I look for one thing: how can tourism create a positive impact that continues after the tourist has gone home? Ultimately, I'm passionate about proving that doing the right thing and doing good business do not have to be two different things.

Tourism should not just be about getting more people to visit a place. It should be about making the place better because people visited. For decades, we have measured tourism success through arrivals, room nights, spending and economic growth. These numbers matter — but they tell only half the story. What if we also measured how much tourism contributes to the people who live there, the culture that defines the destination and the natural environment that makes it worth visiting in the first place? I believe we need to move from tourism that extracts value from destinations to tourism that creates shared value for destinations. That means putting local communities at the centre, making sustainability practical for businesses, protecting nature, respecting culture and designing experiences where visitors don't simply consume a destination...they contribute to it. My idea is simple: Tourism can and should be a force for good. And if we get this right, tourism can become one of the most powerful tools we have for protecting places & cultures, empowering communities and creating a more sustainable future.

Community-based Tourism, Experiential Tourism, Sustainable Tourism

My TED story is rooted in a question that has followed me throughout more than two decades in tourism: What if tourism could be a force for good...not just an industry that generates revenue? I have spent much of my career on the commercial side of tourism and hospitality. I understand the pressures of selling rooms, filling seats, meeting targets and generating returns. But along the way, I also saw the other side of tourism...communities being left out, natural resources being taken for granted, and sustainability sometimes becoming more of a marketing message than a meaningful practice. That changed the way I looked at my industry. Today, my work brings together tourism, sustainability, conservation and community empowerment. From training tourism professionals on globally recognised sustainability standards, to developing locally rooted experiences and supporting conservation initiatives, I am trying to bridge the gap between what we say about sustainable tourism and what we actually do. I don't believe the answer is to stop tourism. I believe the answer is to rethink it. My TED story is about challenging an industry I love to become better, and showing that tourism can be more than a journey for the traveller. It can be a journey towards a better future for the places and people we visit.

People probably don't know that I'm good at connecting seemingly unrelated dots. I enjoy taking ideas from different worlds...tourism, sustainability, business, conservation, community development, storytelling...and finding the connection between them. I'm also good at turning complicated ideas into something people can understand and act on. Whether it is sustainability standards, ESG or responsible tourism, I enjoy breaking down the jargon and asking: "Okay, but what does this actually mean in real life?" And perhaps less obviously, I'm good at spotting stories in ordinary places. A street, a village, a local dish, an old building, a forest or a person can all have an extraordinary story if we take the time to look. That is probably why I enjoy creating tourism experiences and developing ideas that make people see familiar places differently. I like connecting the dots...and then helping other people see the picture.