TRAVEL TRENDS
Masai Mara warriors
We’re getting all dressed up for our 10th birthday In less than six months responsibletravel.com will celebrate its 10th birthday! Over the past ten years we’ve made it our responsibility to select and market more than 4,000 special holidays from all four corners of the planet run by some amazing tour operators and accommodation owners. If you’ll be going out of your way to have an incredible holiday, then you’d expect us to go out of our way to find it. All the holidays share one thing. They put something back. They build schools, communities, factories, water pumps, eco homes. They take responsibility for the travel you do and the livelihoods you affect. Travelling with us is not just a brief stay, it’s a real connection with the people, the landscape,
the culture and the environment. It’s like really living somewhere and enjoying the place as much as the people who live there do. On every holiday page you can read our commitment to how every holiday makes a difference locally. You can also read what other travellers who have been there have experienced. To mark the successes of the past and look to the future a brand new look will be unveiled – a new design, new logo and a revamped site easier to use for both travellers and members. We’ll go on working in the same way with many of our tour operator and accommodation members – tracking bookings from which we earn commission. However from the spring we’ll introduce a new model where
accommodations and small tourism service providers – local attractions, local guides, museums, farmers markets etc – can create and manage their own listings on the site for FREE. In June we launched our sister US site – responsiblevacation. com – in response to a rapid growth in visitors from the US. Accounting for one in ten site visitors and with the US media showing increasing interest in the responsible tourism movement, it seemed the right time to reach across the pond.
What’s the question? We’re the answer!
shutterstock.com
The Biebrza wetland
In June our community site IKnowAGreatPlace. com, launched a brand new Q&A service, allowing a worldwide community of travellers and local people to ask and answer any travel questions. Wondering if you can get married in Antarctica or looking for an authentic hamam in Istanbul? Simply post your travel question to www. IKnowAGreatPlace.com. We’ll find the answer and email you when we’ve got it. Our secret algorithm digs into our vast databases of travellers and travel experts to identify the people most likely to be able your question. For example, they might live where you want to go; have recently visited there; share your interests or be an expert on this place or activity. We contact them on your behalf and put your question to them. This way we help you to get expert local knowledge from around the world. With a membership of nearly 6,000 travellers and locals sharing their tips, photos and blog posts, we’ve created the perfect pool of insider advice.
With a rise of 43 per cent in questions a month and more than 20,000 visitors each month we’re on our way to becoming the world’s favourite travel Q&A site. Until now modern travel has failed to connect local communities with the tourists who want to visit the places they live in. Destinations with big marketing budgets and guidebooks and apps developed by large publishing businesses dominate tourism, sending tourists to the same hotspots and keeping local people out of the conversation. With iknowagreatplace.com, you can avoid being one of the thousand people a day queuing for the tourist bus to the Lost City in Machu Picchu or standing in line for a restaurant in Paris with all the other Brits clutching the same guidebook.
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29/10/2010 14:44