Make Travel Fair was established at the end of 2006 as an online platform to communicate some of the global issues associated with travel, to encourage education amongst travellers and to encourage travel as a means of education.
A successful, award winning 2007
It all started with a homemade website at www.maketravelfair.com built with very little knowledge of web design. It wasn’t ideal but a professional job would have cost the earth and we had no money. Winning ‘Best Online Education Website’ in the Travelmole 2007 Web Awards was a huge surprise given our very amateur ability but our message was strong and ethusiastic. Later that same year Founder – Stephen Chapman – was selected as ‘One-to-Watch in Travel & Leisure’ as part of Courvoisier The Future 500 Rising Stars and featured in The Observer newspaper supplement ‘The Future 500′.
A return to the road for 2008 & a new website
Following a successful 2007 we decided to travel some more and recconect with everything we had been talking about online. A 6 month around the world trip took us to the U.S.A., The Cook Islands, New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. The current website www.maketravelfair.co.uk was put together after we returned home and is designed using the common publishing platform of Wordpress.
We believe that everyone has an interesting, important and unique view of the world as a result of their own childhood, culture and experience. Everyone has story to tell and writing is a great way to communicate that. The blogging bubble may have burst as a result of the paid, sponsored underworld involved in creating favourable blog content but our approach is squeaky clean – honest, unpaid writing that exists because we want it to. Also by writing about and linking to projects that we believe are taking the world in the right direction we are helping them move up the search engine rankings and become easier to find.
Exciting collaborations for 2009
This year has seen us collaborate with The International Ecotourism Society on helping communicate and promote their new ecoDestinations project, and as of March this year Founder Stephen Chapman began some exciting work for whl.travel – one of the most exciting, pioneering and passionately grass roots orientated travel companies to appear in recent years (see WHL: Making Travel A Little Fairer By Design). He has worked in many areas of company – business development, SEO services, social media and tourism development in the field – and been involved in the restructuring to create WHL Group, together with brand creation and the rebranding of whl.travel. It is this work that enabled Make Travel Fair to continue its existence, development and independence during a tough period.
A new year 2010
We look forward to what will hopefully be one of the most exciting years so far. Make Travel Fair will begin to develop commercially with the addition of travel booking functionality that leverages the extensive WHL Group network. We are beginning the year with a trip to South Africa to pilot a newly created tourism business development program for small and medium sized enterprises.
The future
The future for Make Travel Fair is in helping drive a change in attitudes towards travel. It’s not about being green, tagging an ‘eco’ prefix onto a service being offered, nor about creating a new industry called ‘responsible travel’. It’s about unleashing the potential of travel to educate, engage and inspire. It’s about widening our view of what travel encompasses, embracing the work towards sustainability that goes on in all areas and helping to inspire others to follow down the same road.
