User:Robert William Hicks

Background and Early Life
Robert Hicks was born in 1959 and raised in the suburb of Claremont in Cape Town, South Africa. His parents were Jack and Daphne Hicks and he has an older sister, Cheryl Upsher. He attended school at Claremont Primary School (1965-1971) and Westerford High School (1972-1976) in Rondebosch, Cape Town before attaining a Bachelor of Science (Honours) degree at the University of Cape Town (1978-1982). He was conscripted into the South African Defence Force in 1977 serving in Pretoria and Oudtshoorn. After five years of working as a researcher at the Urban Studies research unit of the City of Cape Town, he became the first Tourism and Recreation Planner for the Natal Parks Board, arguably one of the best protected area management agencies in Africa at that time. After a short stint as a Senior Development Officer for the South African Tourism Board (1994) and as a lecturer in Tourism Management at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (1995), he opened Robford Tourism at the end of 1995 in the Atrium Building in Claremont, Cape Town. Robford Tourism College provided SATOUR accredited skills training for tourist guides and tour operators for more than 1500 guides between 1995 and 2001. He also provided a professional tourism development planning consultancy service in fourteen African and three South Pacific counties working in over a hundred national parks and protected areas. He established a form of low-impact luxury beach camping known as Teniti beach camping.

Robert Hicks lived in Nelson, New Zealand from 2009 to July 2012. He currently lives in Swellendam, a small village 230 km east of Cape Town, South Africa.