radar

The last couple of weeks I’ve been traveling in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. It was our first visit in those canadian maritime provinces for my girlfriend and I. Usually, we plan all or at least a part of our trip before leaving home. This time, we decided to take the car (even if gas price is pretty high!) and drive. A real road trip.

12 days of B&B, motels, restaurant, museum, attractions, outdoor activities, tours… and a lot of ideas for this blog.

First of all, here is some of the reflexions I’ve had during my vacations.

1. Travelling without taking the time to reserve or to get info about B&B’s / hotels / motels in advance will grow your expenses.
2. “Visitors Information Centres” have a lot of pamphlets and staff members try to help you as much as there are able to.
3. Signs on the side of the road do a pretty good job.

Yeah… we went on a road trip without a lot of preparation. No booking on the Internet, no printed map, no info sheets, nada! Even if I think that Internet is a good way to get info about your destination, it doesn’t mean that every tourist use that source of info. Sure, this tourism blog is the space I’ve created to write about technology and Internet in a domain that I like which is tourism and travel but I want to be sure to remind everyone that Internet is one of many ways to reach tourists and travelers. It’s growing fast and its importance will grow fast in the next weeks/months/years but it will continue to be one of the many ways. It’s up to you to decide which proportion each ways should take in your marketing strategy depending on the reality of your business.

Update : Here is an interesting French article http://www.veilletourisme.ca/fr/titre_resume_article.aspx?sortcode=1.5.13&id_article=560 giving some statistics

Today, I’ve discovered Tourist Tracks. Tim and Warren write and record audio guided tours of some cities of England and sell them on the Internet. Once you’ve bought a tour, you can download it and transfer it on your iPod (or any other mp3 portable reader) format and print out the map. Quick and simple. I like that idea. I’m not quite sure of the concept of selling it, but there is obviously something to do there.