Seasons Greetings!

Apologies for the lack of posting on Trailbeater, but as you can imagine Christmas with 2 young children has been all consuming!

I hope all our readers are enjoying the Holiday Season as much as we are.  We are in the process of getting the site all ready to launch in January (inbetween teaching our daughter to ride her new bike and eating the turkey leftovers!!)

More from us in 2009, in the meantime, a Happy New Year to you all

Anna & Ben

Dilemmas of integrity

It's a happy event when you first have to ask yourself - is this person right for our site?  It has really made us question exactly what we are about.

We're still busy gathering content and I'm proud to say that, a couple of weeks in, we have got some awesome experiences on board, but more of that later.  The issue arised because we now have a couple of slightly larger operators wanting to be on the site (i.e. they're not a one man band!).  Now there are various characteristics we look for in featuring an operator; they should be independent, authentic, a little off the beaten track, local, not too big and most of all the guide or host should be passionate about what they are doing.  At this early stage it becomes really difficult applying these criteria because saying no for the first time is not easy when you are keen to see the site brimming with content.  Many sites (ebay for example) have taken the view that you let everybody on and allow the community to filter out the dross.  The problem with this approach is that in the early days you need to be very careful about what is up there, because customers are going to come to the site and make a very quick judgement about whether you are just like everybody else or hopefully that there really is something different here.  So it's important to really get across what you're doing through the products on the site.  They almost need to be exaggerated examples of the vision!

Anyway, we decided that we are sticking to our guns and will definitely be filtering who goes on the site which of course means saying no.  However in the cases we came across today we said yes. Ultimately if someone doesn't fit one of the criteria but excels at others then we need to ask ourselves would our customers want to see this persons products on the site, and the answer in this case is a resounding yes.

Anyway to give you a flavour of some of the people who really do fit the bill and excite us, check out Roger Davies who runs A Question of Taste.  Roger is a real foodie who lives in Seville and takes his guests on some stomach rumbling tours including a trip to one of the best Iberian Ham producers or a guided tour of the Tapas bars in the City. 

(apologies to the vegetarians)

Also take a look at Jim Sutherland.  Jim runs a couple of companies nineonesix and pipedtothetop.  And I really think pipedtothetop is such a great idea and dare I say a rare bit of innovation in the UK travel industry.  Jim is a passionate and experienced hills man and has been guiding for years, but in pipedtothetop he'll guide you up a beautiful Scottish Munro, lay on some fine local Scottish produce for lunch and play the pipes at the top. 

Finally, also in Scotland is Jeremy Hastings.  I have had some entertaining conversations and emails with Jeremy over the last few weeks and I'm delighted to see him on the site now. Jeremy runs bird tours and wilderness experiences in Islay.  Now I can't say I've ever been really interested in birding before, but I would love to do this, Jeremy would be great company, the scenery looks out of this world and there is an abundance of wildlife.

Hopefully in future blogs we'll have the time to be able to interview some of these really fascinating and charismatic people.  The problem is the more I find out about them the more I'm jealous of their lifestyle!  I spoke to a person last night in New Zealand running kayak tours and he answered the phone on the beach, bearing in mind it was close to midnight in freezing England - it hurt!

My first pitch!

Wednesday night saw a first for me when I pitched our business, Tourdust, at a Next Women event celebrating female internet heroes. It was a pretty packed room and I was given just three minutes to talk about our business and what we are doing.  My attendence at the event did present us with a bit of a dilemma - we had originally decided to keep our site password protected until the New Year, so that we could have enought time to build enough content on our site before opening the doors to the world so to speak. However, it seemed daft to be presenting a business to a room full of people when they wouldn't be able to view us, so we decided to go ahead.

My pitch seemed to go down well and what was really encouraging was to speak to so many people there who really seemed to like the idea.  

I actually really enjoyed the event. I haven't presented to so many people since my Unilever days, but found that I got a real buzz from it. I guess it really helps when you're talking about something you are very passionate about. In fact, and I never thought I would say this on Wednesday morning before the event, I hope to get the opportunity to do it again (and again and again!!)  

Many thanks again to Simone and Jackie for organising the event. Simone has written up about the event on her Next Women site - our first piece of publicity.

For those readers who are keen to check out the site, please feel free to do so, we would love to hear your feedback. However, we are still in very early beta release and so not actively pushing the site - we still have a huge mountain to climb in getting enough products listed before we start our marketing campaign.  If you have any suggestions for anyone who might want to feature, then please let me know.

Travel - planning in advance or winging it?

SandWagon has written an excellent article extolling the virtues of travelling without a safety net. The argument being that guide books, travel writing & (to a lesser extent) online user generated content all have their place - but that recommendation of other travellers on the road is far better.

This was at the heart of some research (albeit rudimentary) we did earlier this year when we were thinking of setting up Tourdust.  The aim behind Tourdust is to give travellers access to inspiring content about small, independent and authentic travel experiences.  The kind of local tours and great accommodation finds that you only usually hear about when you are out on the road.  We were worried that we would have trouble changing their habits to research and book these kind of things in advance.  We actually found that around 70% of travellers do research 'local activities' in advance and most research is recommendation from friends and family or the operators own websites!

Our conclusion is that even the hardiest of travellers tend to plan a trip around a couple of key cornerstones to their trip.  That could be an out of this world eco-treehouse overlooking pristine forest, a twoday desert camping experience or simply a shark diving day-trip.  They would then plan a rough itinerary around those cornerstones, and fill in the gaps with more run of the mill stuff (either winging it or booking in advance).  And it is these cornerstone experiences which are at the heart of what Tourdust is about.

So, I guess if you are going to plan (and get excited) about what you are going to do when you get there, then things like guide books, blogs, and other user generated content are all great tools. It's just that, like anything, you need to take what is being written with a pinch of salt and try to judge it from the context of the author.  It's kind of the same as word-of-mouth recommendations.  When a gnarly hostel owner told us that Guatemala could get a bit dodgy we listened because he'd grown up bumming around Afghanistan in the 60s staying with local families on a permanent opium high.  If it was a bright eyed graduate on their first ever trip we'd take the warning with a pinch of salt.  Even the Lonely Planet is guilty of this: popular destinations for US travellers tend to be written by US writers and tend to be have a lot longer Warnings and Dangers sections than other LPs.  The Mexico LP is a good case in point - if you took it at face value you'd be more nervous about going to Mexico than The Democratic Republic of Congo (a pretty scary place, or so I have inferred from the excellent Blood River by Tim Butcher!)

photo by flickr user mattmurf