My Destination Team

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My Destination Team

Management Team
Neil Waller - Co-founder, Chief Executive Officer
James Street - Co-founder, Business Development
Kirsty Brown - Content
Alex Collins - Franchise Support
Lee Collins - Multimedia
Miles Heggadon - Production
John Holland - Design
Fay Jones - Commercial
Carl Kim - Product Development
Adrian Land - Search & Social
Nick Slade - Graphics
Anna-Lucy Terry - Social Media Manager
Mark Wallis - Chief Technology Officer

London
United Kingdom

Neil Waller

Co-founder, Chief Executive Officer

Neil grew up in Guildford in the South East of the UK and even from a young age was always looking for business opportunities, once putting up a sign on the driveway of the family home offering to iron clothes (of course ever the entrepreneur, Neil's intention was for the rest of his family to do the ironing, while he concentrated on sales!!!)

While studying at the University of Bath, he had work placements in two leading European Private Equity Companies which further cemented his wish to be on the entrepreneurial side of the table. A keen traveller, which certainly helps with the day job, Neil also loves anything that goes fast, playing sports and making sure he always has the latest gadgets and technology.

London
United Kingdom

James Street

Co-founder, Business Development

James is originally from the Wirral in the UK but is now based in London. He loved his time at school and spent a gap year travelling all over Europe, Australia and New Zealand, which after all the travelling is still his favourite destination. Reluctantly returning home James chose the business course at the University of Bath with a slight intention of going into property once he had completed his degree.

A few work placements down the line and no real inspiration, he grasped the opportunity to work for himself and has been running the network with Neil ever since. He enjoys spending time with family and friends, skiing on both snow and water and any sort of racket sport.

London
United Kingdom

Kirsty Brown

Content

Born in Lincoln in the UK, Kirsty studied for a French and Hispanic Studies degree at the University of Sheffield where she lived & studied in Quebec, Canada for 6 months as well as spending 6 months living and studying in Seville, Spain. Upon completing her degree she moved to France and worked as an English teacher at L'Universite du Maine, Le Mans for a year before returning and completing an MA in Broadcast Journalism.

After a successful work placement at British Sky Broadcasting she freelanced for Sky News before taking up a position as Assistant Producer for Sky Travel, filming in numerous locations from Portofino, Rome & Amsterdam to on a glacier in Iceland, surfboard in California & on skies in Mammoth Mountain! As well as being lucky enough to see the world through work, Kirsty has also spent time travelling through Asia & South America where she trekked the Inca Trail.

Aside from travel Kirsty loves running and has completed the Berlin, French Rivera, Athens and London Marathons as well as a gruelling 65km mountain race in Penygolosa, Spain.

Marbella
Spain

Alex Collins

Franchise Support

Born and raised in Marbella, Alex has the honour of being the company's first employee! Having moved through various departments, he now heads up the support team in Spain. A fan of all things tech, he enjoys problem solving and hopes to help everyone get the most out of their digital experiences.

Outside of work, he loves to play guitar, day-trade US penny stocks, tell everyone what a crazy programmer Bruno is, practise CrossFit & and learn as much about tech geekery as he can fit in to each day. He lives with his girlfriend Charlotte and 2 dogs, who try their hardest not to look embarrassed when they go running in the hills and Alex brings along his snorkel.

Marbella
Spain

Lee Collins

Multimedia

Lee was born in London and started his working life in stock broking and banking working for Chase Manhattan Bank, Credit Sussie and Kleinwort Benson. He left the city and became an Independent Financial Advisor, selling his successful business in 2002 before leaving the UK to work in Hong Kong. Another business opportunity presented itself and this lead to Lee travelling between the UK and Marbella.

Lee fell in love with Marbella and decided that's where he wanted to live and work. Lee introduced the first virtual tours & videos to the mymarbellainfo site, which worked so well, My Destination decided to incorporate them on all other sites, so he has now joined the My Destination team as head of multimedia guiding and training destinations in making virtual tours & videos.

Lee has two grown up sons: Jake is now part of the Multimedia Team while his eldest son Karl, and his family, are the only thing he misses about England.

Marbella
Spain

Miles Heggadon

Production

Miles was born and brought up in the UK. Having spent a year in Brussels prior to going to university, he returned there after his studies, where he spent a further 5 years trying to work out what on earth the European Union was all about. Deciding that this was a thankless task, he moved down to Spain in 2000 where he got into web development and database-driven web applications in particular. Initially linked to the property sector, this work has more recently revolved around the travel industry. As the father of two young children, Miles isn't allowed any outside interests.

Marbella
Spain

John Holland

Design

John was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa and is now based in Marbella. Before moving to Spain he spent 10 years in London working for various design agencies and studios across the capital and was privileged enough to work with a wide range of clients from Adidas to Yahoo. His last role in London saw him working as a design manager at AOL where he was in charge of the creative team and was lead designer on a wide variety of successful campaigns working with many top brands such as Lloyds TSB, Sony Erricson, Time Warner, Lufthansa and VW to name a few. Before joining My Destination he was head of design at Betfred.com in Gibraltar and was in charge of the redesign of the all new Betfred.com site.

Hes passionate about branding and design and has a keen interest in technology. Johns addicted to motorbikes and spends most of his spare time exploring the Spanish country or doing superbike track days at various tracks around Spain. In the winter you will find him in Sierra Nevada where he spends all his spare time snowboarding.

Marbella
Spain

Fay Jones

Head of Commercial

Fay has been in sales since the tender age of 4 when she decided to convince her beloved Grandma to bake shortbread so she could sell it on the front doorstep to passers-by in her summer holidays! There began her negotiation training and she chose to follow a career in Sales, more specifically Advertising Sales when she left Manchester University in 1999.

Fay moved to Spain in 2001 in search of bi-lingual opportunities and enjoyed a successful career in print media eventually directing a sales team across multiple titles selling advertising space to International, National and Local clients. She finally made the move to online when offered a position by Neil and James to take on the My Destination Marbella site and quickly understood the commercial potential making the Marbella site our most successful site to date.

Equipped with the knowledge of selling, managing and administrating one of the My Destination franchises and with a continual overflow of energy, enthusiasm and intuition Fay was promoted to the role of Head of Commercial where she now ensures our franchisees have strong commercial training and support on a daily basis.

In her spare time (that few minutes where New Zealand hasn’t woken up and Spain is going to bed) Fay enjoys fine dining at one of her friend’s restaurants in Marbella and the occasional seriously late night partying or an adrenalin rush on the ski slopes!

London
United Kingdom

Carl Kim

Product Development

Korean-born Carl was running amok in kindergarten and primary school in Buenos Aires before the city became a fashionable destination for steak hungry tourists and side stepping tango lovers. In Australia he discovered the East Coast, began high school, completed university with degrees in Commerce and in Electronic Arts, but before you could ask ‘where the bloody hell are you?’ he landed in London where he still finds himself and unable to comprehend the chip butty.

With over 16 years professional experience with the Internet, and having worked in various financial companies (in retail banking, investment banking, asset management), online publishing, usability consultancy (for leading brands such as Sky, Ladbrokes, Virgin Media, Nokia) in places such as India, Singapore, Sydney, Dublin, Helsinki, Frankfurt and Stockholm, Carl is finally combining his experience in digital media with his interest in travel.

When travelling he is taking photographs and when he is not he is looking at travel photography. He looks forward to the day when computers come without keyboards and networks are ubiquitous (we’re almost there).

London
United Kingdom

Adrian Land

Search & Social

Adrian has been doing SEO for over 12 years - even before it was called SEO. Adrian’s involvement in the sector has been in all of its forms, varieties and flavours starting in the dotcom bubble, small to medium size ventures to big ecommerce sites. In addition, Adrian has been extensively involved in paid search and, more recently, social media. All these topics are converging as search engines and other platforms are getting more personal, multifaceted and interesting.

The majority of Adrian’s working life has been spent in the travel industry; most recently at Thomas Cook Group, Hotels.com (Expedia) and HomeAway Group. All of these roles covered multiple countries and languages. Adrian has been lucky enough to have travelled a fair amount (with many more adventures still to do).

He’s a keen skier, a scuba diver and motorcyclist. His adventures have included being caught up in hurricane Ivan while Barbados, walking safaris in Tanzania, diving in Thailand, beaching in Australia through to hosteling around mainland Europe. Today Adrian’s travelling has temporarily slowed down to more conventional holidays with his wife and 2 young children.

Marbella
Spain

Nick Slade

Graphics

Nick was born in Cape Town, South Africa, but moved to southern Spain at an early age along with his family. Having lived here for most of his life and having finished schooling in Marbella, Nick is practically fluent in Spanish and is comfortable to call this great place home. His interests are in sports, such as tennis, cycling, skiing and quadding, but mainly anything to do with computers or electronic gadgets!

Towards the end of his study years, still unsure of where he was going career-wise, Nick was introduced to graphic design through a friend of his and found an interest straight away. He has been with My Destination since February '08.

London
United Kingdom

Anna-Lucy Terry

Social Media Manager

Born and raised in London, Anna ‘s appetite for digital marketing started when working as an account executive for a digital agency, Diffiniti before heading off to live in Kenya. After 4 years of studying Management Science at Loughborough University, she completed various internships in Social Media before entering the Search and Social team at My Destination. A year down the line, Anna is now heading up the Social Media team –an area of digital she is hugely passion about – who wouldn’t want to work with Facebook and Twitter all day?!

Anna’s recent travel exploits include hitchhiking around France, a jam-packed tour of India and a fleeting visit to Berlin. Her next adventure will take her island hopping in Malaysia, preferably with a camera, good music, a few lovely cocktails and lots of authentic Malaysian Laksa in tow!

Marbella
Spain

Mark Wallis

Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Built on a foundation of a 1st Class Honours degree in Computer Engineering and being bought up in an era where computer games were loaded by tape recorder and Windows didnt exist, Mark brings over 20 years of technical experience to the My Destination team.

His career began working for the defence industry and he then went on to become a senior technical consultant\solution designer for 14 years in a major Worldwide Mobile Operator in the time when the mobile internet was first born (remember WAP?) . Mark was involved in cutting edge projects such as the first MMS platform, Mobile Video streaming and the launch of the iPhone in the UK.

He also brings with him experience from his own technology start-up company; understanding the challenges of running and supporting a global company delivering technical solutions to enable commercial success. Mark has enthusiasm, dedication, passion and a real determination to make things happen with everything he is involved in; his energy inspires the team at every level.

"Not all those who wander are lost" - J. R. R. Tolkien

My Destination Team

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My Destination