The Local Travel Movement
More and more travellers desire extraordinary travel experiences off the beaten track. They want to immerse themselves in the local cultures and environments of the countries they visit. They want to get the real thing.

There is a steadily growing Local Travel Movement that is promoted by various people and organizations from all around the world. Local travel operators, specialist travel providers and services, as well as online platforms, guides and bloggers have joined forces to promote a more responsible, more authentic and more meaningful way to discover the world. It’s all about “travelling like a local.”

Challenges in the travel market
We see two big challenges with improving the travel market with respect to the values connected with Local Travel.

(1) Travellers lack knowledge about the alternatives. The big search engines deliver lots of irrelevant results, travel agencies mostly focus on the mainstream, and the good stuff is scattered across the web and world. The current search process is unstructured and painful. We believe that before travellers can have a strong local experience, they need to be able to find the travel offers that best fit their needs.

(2) We see that specialist and local travel providers often lack the resources to gain global visibility and reach. Traditional and search-engine marketing are expensive and often inefficient. Social media is time consuming. These providers face challenges to be discovered by customers and thus need to be empowered with the right technology.

How pocketvillage wants to help
pocketvillage is a web start-up in the making and is set to launch a private beta version in December 2010. We strongly identify with the values of the Local Travel Movement. So how does pocketvillage actually want to meet the named challenges and improve the travel market?

Travellers – We help people experience life-changing journeys…
(1) …through the aggregation of hundreds of selected travel providers in a single search index. This results in a broad choice of hand-picked and extraordinary – local, responsible, cultural, eco-friendly, adventurous, outdoor etc. – accommodations, tours, and activities.

(2) …through an innovative, interactive and inspirational step-by-step process that helps travellers find and choose the experience that perfectly fits their individual personality, desires and requirements. People get individualized recommendations they didn’t even think about before and see new ways to discover the world as it really is.

Providers – We help local travel providers to connect with travellers…
…through being included in the pocketvillage search index and inspiration process and thereby being featured on our platform. In a simple yet powerful way specialist and local travel providers can showcase their offers and brand as well as achieve a higher worldwide visibility.

Through this additional marketing channel, providers get more customers and enable more extraordinary travel experiences. Those travel providers also gain a bigger lobby through pocketvillage as we advocate the ideas of Local Travel at events and in the media.

Communities – We help local communities to develop sustainably…
…through enabling more and more socially, environmentally and economically responsible travellers to “go local.” We want local communities around the world to benefit from the growth in travellers who decide to travel locally, spend their money locally, learn about the local culture and respect the natural and historical heritage.

The growth in the numbers of socially responsible travellers will potentially also contribute to more cross-cultural understanding. It will level the playing field for small-scale travel providers and will support the preservation of nature and heritage sites worldwide.

Learn more about pocketvillage