Tourdust: Are Local Collectives The Future For Authentic Travel?

(We wrote this post for maketravelfair.  You can see it in its original format at http://www.maketravelfair.co.uk/2009/01/27/tourdust-are-local-collectives-the-future-for-authentic-travel/)

Everybody has a tale of that time they really got under the skin of a local place and people. For us, it has to be the time we were adopted by Rafi, a Sri Lankan policeman in Kandy. To our shame, with the typical cynicism of the so called experienced traveller, we had spent the day swatting away assorted hawkers selling bits and bobs.  In the evening we fell in talking to Rafi at the guesthouse and it soon migrated into a late night drinking session with his buddies, the head of the Sri Lankan navy and the guest house owner. The next day they took us on an escorted (& free) tour of the stunning Sigiriya followed by an unforgettable evening at Rafi’s house. The hospitality was out of this world and truly shamed us English by comparison, ultimately we had an awesome time.

Clearly these sorts of experience are tough to orchestrate but there are some great efforts underway in the tourism industry to promote authentic travel. In our efforts to recruit local operators for Tourdust we’ve come across some fascinating local collectives who are really trying to open up the skin of a place and welcome travellers in.

Local operators, guides or accommodation hosts tend to work within a strong local network. An assortment of accommodation options and interesting experiences in a locale are always going to draw more people than one local kayaking guide no matter how out of this world the kayaking is. We’ve come across a couple of initiatives that take this local network to the next level:

• Celes Davar at Earth Rhythms has teamed up with over 50 partners in the Riding Mountain and southern Manitoba region in Canada. Bringing you face to face with chefs, artists, musicians, aboriginal teachers, yoga practitioners, guides, naturalists, agricultural producers, and many other remarkable local people. Its about enabling guests to have direct personal contact with a variety of local and authentic people who are the story-tellers and experience providers.

• Robert Etherington from Ballooning In Tuscany runs some highly recommended hot air ballooning over Tuscany and is trying to pull together various locals to promote the village of Montisi. “At the heart of it will be the idea that if you wish to stay in a real, working Tuscan hilltop village with olive groves, vineyards and market gardens you will not be pampered and cosseted and treated like a visiting dignitary, but will have to take your place in the queue like everybody else for your drink, and plan your own itinerary of interesting things to do. There are also organised things to choose from (like ballooning, painting courses, wine tours etc) as well as facilities for rent for those that want to work on something in idyllic surroundings e.g. writing, painting, reading etc.” Robert has already been voluntarily running the website Montisi for a couple of years.  It isn’t a question of packaging though: “the old idea of bundling up various activities into “packages” is a well tried one that simply puts some people off, and encourages the attentions of another kind of client that wants to be entertained and told what to do next.”

Two different approaches that beg the question: what is the best way to do this?  I think there is some fantastic potential in using collective web tools such as online groups, group blogging platforms and wikis to bring together and promote individual local operators so that the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Ultimately, can the social web allow the small guys to team up, collaborate and compete more effectively than the big guys? We’d love to pull together something like this for Tourdust and we’d love to hear any input & ideas on how to execute it.

Beer and Good Times in Germany

The last couple of days on Twitter, various people have been tweeting about what they were doing 10 years ago and it has taken me on a very pleasant trip down memory lane. In January 1999 I was a mere 20 years old, feeling pretty invincible and starting to discover the joys of travel.

I spent the academic year in a Bavarian town called Passau – which lies on the Austrian / German border and where the Rivers Danube & Inn converge.  This beautiful town was a perfect base from where to explore Central Europe and it gave me a real taste for independent and authentic travel.  Many people will not have heard of Passau, but it is a place where men still wear Lederhosen at the weekends (and not in an ironic sense) and there are 4 local breweries serving the alcohol consumption of a 50,000 population.  Each brewery was beautifully located, with the obligatory beer garden and served good old fashioned Bavarian cuisine, a far cry from the All Bar Ones and Pitcher and Pianos that I was used to back home. 

One of the highlights of the year for me, was a beer festival called the Mai Dult. This was a local version of the well known Oktober Fest,  organised by the breweries of the town.  As a slightly self-conscious 20 year old, I would never have pictured myself dancing on the tables to an oom-pah band, a huge stein of beer in hand, but there I was. Elderly men sat with us at our table teaching us the words to the drinking songs (which still occasionally come out now after a few too many) it was one of those experiences where you felt totally absorbed into the environment and felt you truly belonged to the community. 

A few years later, Ben and I went to Munich for the weekend and having told him all about the Maidult, we went to the Hofbrauhaus there to try and recreate the experience. But somehow, being sat in a room with no local people and lots of English speaking tourists, it was all different.  There was no dancing on tables, but even if there had been, I don’t think I could have done, it would have seemed too false.

Do I come across as a pretentious travel snob? I hope not, but I do truly believe that you find some of the most authentic and real experiences when you lose your inhibitions and throw yourself into something, rather than expecting an experience by numbers to be delivered to your plate…

What's wrong with the UK tourism industry?

(Is this your stereotype of British tourism?)

So when the economic malaise struck (and we were mid development with Tourdust) it become obvious that we needed to focus on promoting British experiences.  To promote the best of the authentic and independent experiences on offer in these fair Isles.

First issue was finding them and sure there were a few around the place, but nothing like the concentration you will find in Australia, New Zealand or South Africa.  Take a look at the regional tourism boards and it's all hotels, B&Bs and National Trust properties.  Surely there had to be more going on?

Next issue was getting them onto Tourdust.  Now as long as you are providing the right kind of experience with that essence of authenticity then there really aren't a lot of barriers to entry. No up front cost, minimal cost if you get any business through our site, just a few hours to sign up, add some photos etc - we were even offering to help them do it!  Without going into details there were a whole lot more "erm not really interested, maybe when you're successful" responses from English operators in particular than anywhere else.  Interestingly Scottish operators had an attitude much more akin to that of our antipodean cousins.  Now to be fair there are a whole heap of travel directories out there and as a cynical Englishman myself my first instinct is always to say no, but even so the difference with other countries was so marked.  Are we really less open to getting out there and promoting our businesses?

The good news is that there are some fantastic companies out there, we just need more of them. Anyone who reads a Sunday broadsheet travel section will know about all the yurts, glamcamping & eco options and I'm proud to say we've got some really exciting stuff on Tourdust already (vineyard tours, fly fishing, foraging, buschraft, horse riding, birding, kayaking, etc ....).

So here's my thoughts on what needs to be done if we want to have a thriving inbound & domestic independent travel scene in England:

• The Tourist boards need to start supporting and highlighting small and independent guides and different places to stay.  I had an insightful conversation with one un-named tourism board who admitted that they couldn't feature many of the eco treehouses and yurts that have sprung up because they didn't have a proper rating from some official review board!!
• There should be grants available for people setting up innovative small-scale tourism ventures that attract visitors (not just more B&Bs) - thinking about it I think there may already be with the rural tourism grants?
• Operators should look to offer stuff at a variety of price points.  There's definitely a place for the £300 a night yurt and the whole glamcamping movement, but how about the £70 a night yurt? or half day tours?  I was pleasantly surprised for instance to see Seafreedom Kayak offering a nights B&B with a days kayaking from £77 per person.    If people are going to be staying here this year because of the economy then we need to give them some reasonably priced options.
• We need people to innovate and build on the unique cultural strengths we have to hand.  Why isn't someone offering small group tours of the finest real ale pubs and craft brewers?  Why aren't there sea kayak operators all other the estuaries and harbours of Devon and Cornwall?  Cheese tours of the West Country, Cider, etc. (excuse me the food & wine obsession, I'm a little hungry)

It always maddens me when I hear of tourists visiting and only hitting London, Oxford and Cambridge.  It is an entirely historic-sight driven agenda which misses all of the highlights of these stunning islands.  It also means that the tourism dollar is concentrated mostly in a couple of large pockets instead of being dispersed into the desperately needy rural communities.   Ideas anybody?

NOTE:

I stand corrected, there are some lovely modestly priced yurts out there.  It's worth pointing out that I would love to stay at a £300 a night yurt, I just can't afford to.  We have a couple of more affordable but trully stunning yurts on Tourdust with Eco retreats and Broome Retreat.  Also check out Go-Glamcamping for some very enticing options.

Beta launch of Tourdust

Finally, the time has come after the best part of a year and a half of midnight planning sessions (and trying to make decisions whilst feeding the kids) to announce the beta launch of Tourdust.  We’re inviting you to come kick the tyres at Tourdust.com and let us know what you think. It’s still early days, we only started building content in December (we’ve got 130 experiences online, we’re aiming for way, way more than that, ahem we have our work cut out ….) and we need to fix a few things here and there, but essentially we’re open for business.

So what is Tourdust?

Tourdust is all about discovering authentic travel experiences from passionate locals.  We want to become the leading global community site for the long tail of travel, to create this fantastic resource so that any independent traveller, wherever in the world they’re headed, can come to Tourdust and find a couple of awesome local gems that will be the highlight of their trip.  Think photo workshops with a professional photographer in beautiful Umbria, stunning eco tree-houses in private pristine forest in South Africa or birding and bushcraft on the Isle of Mull with Jeremy and his Landrover.  Whilst there is plenty of competition out there, no-one else is anywhere close to achieving this.

Tourdust - Making searching for travel ideas pleasurable

A quick search for your next holiday will undoubtedly lead you to a plethora of hideously designed aggregation sites whose priority is only search engine optimisation and getting you to click on an advert.  For some reason, despite the sheer volumes of brainpower over at Google towers, these crappy sites are still the ones at the top of your next Google search.  Travel is a fun & inspiring product, so when you decide on a rainy winter’s night to go online to check out ideas for your next holiday, why can’t it be a pleasure instead of something that leaves you feeling fuzzy and under-whelmed?  So we have put every effort into creating a site which is beautiful and dead simple to use.  Big pictures, loads of white space and a cracking user interface – big thanks to Cennydd & Paul over at Clearleft who truly are legends at this stuff and Max at New Bamboo the agile development gurus who built the nuts & bolts of the site.  They somehow managed to put up with our tinkering and interfering, something very few of my agency contacts have managed in the past…

Tourdust and the Long Tail

Tourdust is essentially a classic long tail business model.  The long tail is a term coined by Chris Anderson to describe the large collective market of small niche products.  It has been in the news recently as it’s been challenged by some new research basically claiming there is more money in selling millions of copies of Coldplay’s latest album (which is surprisingly good by the way) than from the combined sales of all the niche bands out there.  Our take on this debate is that long tail products can suffer when the sheer variety of choice online (and the frequent pain in sorting through it) means that most of us just follow the crowd and buy the popular items.  As we see it, the big challenge for the long tail is how to get it in front of paying customers looking as good as all those big budget products with teams of marketing spods behind them?  Some sites are doing a really nice job of this (check out etsy and bigcartel) but there are still a load of awful old travel directory sites somehow getting page views (I won’t name names).  With Tourdust, we have tried to take advantage of simple social tools (such as user generated content and social networking) and marry them with a great user experience and visual design to really bring the authentic long tail of travel to life.  

Tourdust and responsible travel

Clearly there is a responsible travel / fair trade angle to what we are trying to do here and we have thought long and hard about how much to amplify this.  On one hand you can jump on a fashionable bandwagon and benefit from the trend, on the other hand we don’t want people to think we are exclusively for the organic underwear brigade.  We’ve decided to focus on what we think is most important to travellers – which is having fantastic experiences on holiday.  We know that people are pursuing more authentic experiences on their holidays (even Mintel recognise this) but this is not about people wanting to be more green as much as it is about having memorable experiences which become stories for years to come.   People want stories to tell, not about a wine tour with a bus load of irritating tourists but about the great wine enthusiast who took you round the small vineyards in his 4x4, and took the time to share his passion for viticulture and the workings of a vineyard.  The fact that we are supporting local communities and economies by putting travellers directly in touch with authentic local businesses is really a happy side effect.  Ultimately the only way to get responsible travel mainstream is to make responsible choices as appealing if not more appealing than in their own right!

So what have we done differently with Tourdust?

We’re certainly not breaking any new ground with funky new applications, but we are concentrating on executing right with all the great tools that are already out there.  

We have tried to strike a delicate balance between commerce and community by welcoming the businesses themselves into the community with open arms.  After all, if we can give them the tools to easily chuck up some inspiring content and to tap into their existing networks of customers and fellow travel businesses, we can create long tail content that is compelling, inspiring and easy to find for customers.  With the economy headed the way it is, boy are we glad we didn’t go with that free advertising model….

We have tried to treat our suppliers and customers as intelligent individuals.  We want travellers to be able to get a sense for the personality and character of an operator or guide.  So we openly encourage operators to promote the name of their business, their contact details and link to their own website (no walled gardens!).  Sure, we may lose revenue as customers contact them directly, but then it’s our job to offer a better and safer experience so that if they do go to one of our supplier’s websites to find out more, they will want to come back to us to get in touch with them.  After all, they’re only going to go away and try and find them on Google anyway!

We have tried to be a little bit innovative with our enquiry / booking system.  Travel sites today seem to be totally polarised, they either rely on passing on plain old emails (which operators usually have to pay to reply to!) or complex booking systems.  Some larger sites are even a little devious, taking you through the rigmarole of extracting all of your personal details, a tidy little deposit and only then telling you its going to take a couple of days to check availability!  We know from our research that it would be asking a lot of the smaller operators to provide us with a feed of their availability for some kind of live booking system.  We are also aware that these are complex and personal products where some buyer / seller interaction is usually called for.    So we have built a Facebook message centre like system with some neat functionality to convert the conversation to a formal booking with online payment at the right time.  Simply put, there are no barriers to the traveller seeing something they like and quickly popping a message over and a conversation beginning.  After all wouldn’t you rather have a conversation with your guide before committing to a two day wilderness experience?

Who are our competition?

The online travel industry is a huge market but there is a lot of competition.  Much of the current innovation in the industry is around travel inspiration sites.  It seems the industry is barrelling head-long towards producing better and better travel writing and media, both professional and user contributed (Worldreviewer, Travelmuse and Matadortravel are good examples) but what you have is loads of good stories about places and things to do, yet when you actually want to book something, you’re stuck with the likes of Expedia which is fine for faceless hotels or trawling through the Google search listings for the decent stuff.  Basically the reader gets all hot under the collar and excited about that great rafting trip (that some traveller has painstakingly written up) and all they will find is a Google ad to some super- commercialised rafting outfit!

Admittedly, there is a swarm of new companies trying to tap the ‘experiences’ / adventure travel angle (viator, isango, adventurelink to name a few) but they are definitely headed more toward the larger operator / bus tours / large groups end of the market.

Of course, there are also some excellent sites pushing responsible travel (responsibletravel and yoursafeplanet for instance) who definitely do overlap with what we are trying to do and are doing a fantastic job of raising awareness of some of the negative impacts of tourism.

Finally there are a couple of really promising emerging sites that are a great way to find a local guide to look after you (leaplocal and ourexplorer), which are definitely complementary to what we are trying to do.

Did we forget to mention Tripadvisor?  With 250,000 properties on their database they are, shall we say, a not inconsiderable competition.   Primarily focused on accommodation they do have some experiences, I guess we just need to concentrate on really serving our niche well.

The exciting thing is there is so much potential to somehow open-web-ify (I just made that up) Tourdust and marry our content up with much of the above.  Definitely watch this space on that one.

The people 

Tourdust is a small and authentic business in its own right.  We (Anna and Ben Colclough - link to linked in) divvy up the daily running of the business and looking after our young kids.  We are now interchangeable to the extent that our kids get confused which of us is Mummy and which is Daddy.  We love travelling and were inspired to start Tourdust after having a wonderfully authentic experience in Mongolia (possibly a little too authentic… ask us one day).   Ultimately, we are incredibly jealous of all the people we have signed up to Tourdust, because they have this fantastic lifestyle taking people out mountain biking on some beautiful farm or some such and we’d really quite like to be doing the same ourselves one day.

With Tourdust we are taking a step closer.  Ben’s previous job was as International Marketing Director for premium cards at American Express and Anna headed up the day-to-day analysis, research and client management at Market Sentinel a social media consultancy.  We have collective experience at Unilever, L.E.K. strategy consultants and have had solid prior experience running businesses.  Also involved are Peter Sweetman, former European IT Director at BP and Stephen Natrass, former head of responsible travel at Exodus Travel.  We’re on the lookout for experienced mentors – so if you want to get involved and think you can add something please do get in touch. 

You might think we’re mad to be starting up a travel business at the heart of the direst economic situation since the great depression.  Unfortunately, unlike Peter Schiff, we didn’t really see that one coming.  Still there are some advantages, being your typical Internet business we are already well prepared for a low income in the early days, every cloud…!

Please, help us in anyway you can.  We’re trying to support lots of small businesses, we’re not trying to make a fortune out of it and we try to share out the niceness to suppliers, customers and competitors alike.  Is it possible to make a success out of a business whilst being nice to everyone?  We are going to try.