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Neil MacLean

Neil MacLean became well-known in the Scottish tourism world through his long-running travel and food columns in the Sunday Times. He won a Glenfiddich award for food writing, created the UK Amateur Chef of the Year contest, judged restaurant competitions including the original Macallan Taste of Scotland awards and wrote Food for All Seasons, a book on modern Scottish cooking.

A former Travel Writer of the Year, Neil also edited the travel pages of the Daily Mail and was travel correspondent for Scottish Field, Esquire and the London magazine. He launched Expedia UK, Microsoft's online travel agency in 1990 and subsequently consulted to internet travel start-ups including Air Miles.

Neil is a specialist in online public relations, helping travel brands derive maximum benefit from the changing media landscape and to find new and effective ways to communicate with their market.

Earlier this year he launched SmallMediaLarge www.smallmedialarge.co.uk to promote Scottish tourism using a radical combination of mainstream media relations, social media marketing and multimedia publishing. He is joined by Claire Dean, former reporter and presenter with Scottish Television and lecturer in broadcast and online journalism at Caledonian University.