Partner Article

The alternative to dining alone when travelling

It’s travel focus week on Bdaily. Here, Carolyn Pearson, founder of Maiden Voyage, discusses the niche market in which her business operates.

I started maiden-voyage.com as a result of my own experience as a female business traveller, where I wanted an alternative to sitting in my hotel room eating room service or dining alone in a restaurant.

It was also important that I felt safe and secure when travelling to new places and there wasn’t one place that I could go to, to identify ‘female friendly’ hotels. It never occurred to me to launch first in the UK and then expand internationally, we got so much international coverage when we launched that we had little choice in where our members came from and we now have members in over 60 countries. Whilst the business has its registered office in Leeds, it uniquely runs from a virtual office in ‘the Cloud’.

Starting a purely internet based business gave me the immediate advantage that a lot of what I did could be based in the ‘Cloud’ minimising the need for expensive infrastructure. The online tools available today are phenomenal by comparison to those available just a few years ago and many of them are free. It’s important for us to be agile, flexible, scalable, geo-independent and to keep our overheads to a minimum.

I believe that in the next decade we will see less and less people heading to a traditional office and working patterns will change as we conduct much of what we do online. By working in the Cloud we can literally run the business from anywhere and indeed when the ash cloud struck, maiden-voyage.com was run from a beach resort in Antigua. My role involves extensive travel so I can run the company from wherever I am as long as I have an internet connection.

I wanted to provide more benefits for our members so I decided to have city guides for the top 100 cities around the world, written by women for women and so I set about appointing international ambassadors. We now have a team of ambassadors in cities such as Dubai, Beijing, Sydney, New York, Vienna and closer to home, here in Newcastle, the virtual team is managed 100% online using online tools.

The ambassadors are predominantly a contact point for travellers so that they can ask specific questions about the cities they are travelling to, but there is a commercial element too for those that are that way inclined and a really effective way of expanding rapidly overseas. They can help us to identify the female friendly hotels, the less intimidating restaurants and recommend their hairdressers and nail bars.

In the social age, people are much more trusting of peer referrals than pure advertising and the ambassadors have created a strong feeling of community. I’m occasionally challenged on running a virtual work-force of people, many of whom I haven’t physically sat in the same room as. I think this will become more and more the norm and quite frankly, I know from experience, that you can make a ‘duff’ appointment at a physical interview too.

Because many of these tools low-cost or even free, it significantly reduces the barriers to entry of an online business in comparison to traditional business. They really pave the way for global business and can help your organisation to compete with larger organisations. You can ‘box above your weight’, give the impression of a much larger organisation and compete favourably on cost management.

I would encourage older more established businesses to think about inviting in internet entrepreneurs to share their online strategies they might find it thought provoking and eye-opening and come up with innovative ways of driving down cost by simple things such as Skyping with off-shore development teams as an alternative to regular physical visits.

Tony Rice CEO of Cable and Wireless agrees, stating: “We are just at the start of an exciting era when the capability of broadband and the evolution of disruptive technologies allow a new breed of businesses to develop combining a low and flexible cost base with a limitless reach to consumers. Maiden-voyage.com is an example of just such an innovative start up that uses this platform to offer a unique and important capability to a growing number of female travellers”.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by maiden-voyage.com .