As some will be aware P and I have been at the World Travel Mart in Docklands for the past two days. Things have gone extremely well:

First of all we signed the deal with Active Hotels to put 3000 accommodation providers on the site, excellent deals for the users and cracking coverage all over the country. Sime should be loading them up soon; it’ll add a massive amount of content to the site. Better prices than lastminute.com in 80% of cases also.

We’ve changed the sales strategy also. All non-accommodation businesses can go on totaltravel for FREE. That means every restaurant, pub, attraction and everything else will be able to get their own site for nothing. You may think we’ve lost the plot but the reasons are as follows;

Our new extranet means that the businesses can build their own listing – see here Inverlochy Castle: "Inverlochy Castle " for a nice example, we’ll charge for building it if they can’t but it’s very easy and very

The site will get lots more businesses on there making it far more useful to the user

The site gets lots more pages registered with Google and other search engines and therefore comes up in far more search engine results pages – more traffic.

We’ll sell more room nights because of the extra traffic.

The site will be unique - no other site will have the same breadth of content.

The industry loves us and is talking about us already. An excellent viral marketing strategy opportunity. It makes an excellent story, the industry press were very interested in our site today and are very keen on doing a story or two.

We’re getting some marvellous discounts because the advertising is free.

These businesses are more open to linking to our site increasing our rankings in the search engines.

Anyway to prove the point, we’ve got the following coming on board this week – this is just the start.

English heritage – 120 properties

Historic Scotland – 80 properties

National Trust – 650 properties (75% there, we need to follow up but confident they’ll be right)

25 welsh castles, 35 welsh golf courses, 40 properties from the loch ness region, 55 businesses in Docklands, London, the imperial war museums (6 of em I think from memory), Historic Royal Palaces (Hampton Court, Kensington Palace, Tower of London, Kew palace, Kew Gardens), Houses of Parliament, St Paul’s Cathedral. We’ve also got some mega discounts coming from the likes of Alton Towers, Madam Tusauds, London Eye, Warwick Castle, Thorpe Park, Shakespeare’s Globe and loads of others.

I’ve also arranged for our information to be sent out to over 50 tourist authorities like Belfast, Carmarthenshire, Somerset. They will include the free listing information in their newsletters to members

We need to get a load of restaurants, bars, clubs and other entertainment on there also. We’ll probably speak to the restaurant association about getting the message to their members. We should think about getting shops on there too as everyone goes shopping whilst on their jollies.

We’ve got some cracking search engine friendly links from these guys websites lined up too.

All good stuff.

If you know anyone with a business that would benefit from a free listing send through the details. And if any associations or other ‘bodies’ where we can get an efficient hit, come to mind, let me know. It’s looking good. We’re relying on selling rooms but if we get anywhere near the average conversion figs that Active Hotels have given us, we’ll be sweet and we’ll have by far the best travel website on the internet.

On another note Pete went round and introduced himself to the tourism authorities for the next 14 countries we intend to go at next year. He got their details, told them a little about us whilst sussing out who will help us and who won’t. Some are very keen for us to get started others like the Dutch and the Germans (who make money from their own websites) were not so welcoming and a little perturbed. At least we know our enemy now. He had one very scrumptious meeting with the Chairwomen of the ETC (European Tourist Commission) who is very keen for us to do a presentation to their new ‘body’ with regards to talking about a new European website project that we may be able to get involved in.

As soon as the hotels are loaded up, the members login and booking process sorted we’ll be going live and setting up the default totaltravel.com home page to link off to the GB, AU, NZ and soon to be Ireland, sites. We need to get this all done soon and start making some real money. Then the fun will really begin.

Very exciting times I reckon.

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