Travel Explorations – the story of a pioneering travel guide for adventure seeking globetrotters!

Today explorers and adventurers as David Hempleman-Adams, Redmond O`Hanlon, Børge Ousland, Liv Arnesen, Erling Kagge and Franck Goddio, show ways for others and make our lives more interesting. They represent a small, but unique group of travellers, who have been to unusual places and done unusual things.

In 1986, travelling become our "heart and soul". Our interest in travel adventures encouraged us to found the website, Travel Explorations (www.TravelExplorations.com) on 3rd July 2000, with the slogan "The website for the new generation traveller"!

Travelling into remote and untouched areas gave us new "kicks" continuously. Example of these are crocodile hunting with the Insect tribe in Papua New Guinea, encountering the Bushmen in the Kalahary desert in Africa, visiting tribes in the Golden Triangle, escaping from hungry bears in Alaska, climbing Kilimanjaro, dancing the ferocious Choopy-dance with the nomads of Iran, searching for puma in the Amazon, investigating the quest on Oak Island in Canada, and exploring ancient mysteries in Peru.

Photo. Geir Moen and Stein Morten Lund. The founders and owners of Travel Explorations in Norway.

Our "paradise" was bushwhacking dense jungles where we could admire strange animals and meet exotic tribes. It convinced us that neither words, photographs or films do the world's places justice - they must been seen, heard and touched! So we launched the motto: Everything untried is possible! We think this is a fitting motto for kind of travellers: adventure seeking globetrotters!

After years of travelling, the challenge to find new opportunities for unique adventures grew larger. Wherever we searched for inspiration and useful information, sources were few or irrelevant. By sharing experience with other travellers on our tours, we also understood that sometimes we, and some times them, missed interesting places on the way.

Photos of our main inspiration sources: Thor Heyerdahl and James Cook: Two great explorers!

We were also convinced that an increasing number of people today would like to experience unique travel adventures instead of walking in the footprints of others. Therefore, we decided to write and collect personal travel tales and distribute these through our website.

We have made a commitment to:
• Make travellers understand that the world is bigger than all the "reproduced information" covered in media about cities as London, Roma, Barcelona and Paris etc.
• Provide travellers with stories from unique places and help them see, feel and hear the sound of being there. Opposite to all media sources providing fact based information.
• Be a counterpart to all the negative coverage in global media about places and incidents around the world, and instead tell about opportunities for unique adventures.

Of course travelling can be risky. In general, we encourage travellers to think positively about places around the world, but also to consider negative aspects of their tours. In most cases, we believe that travellers will find places that are enjoyable and people who are nice.

At the same time we identified need for promoting travel services related to this special kind of traveller. Over the years, many small, exciting tour operators have popped up. Because they are small in size, they have limited capacity for doing promotional work. So we realized that we could assist them in reaching travellers who would like something extraordinary. Based on this we developed our business idea. 

We therefore decided to offer tour operators services for:
• Utilizing internet as an alternative sales and marketing channel
• Giving advice about internet marketing in order to better reach their target group
• Make them understand that instead of "selling" destinations, products, programs and itineraries, sales efforts focusing on "selling" unique adventures are more successful.

Our associated tour operators are specialized in taking ordinary people to unusual places where they experience memorable adventures for life. Today we attract adventure seeking globetrotters to pioneering and highly qualified tour operators as Eventyrreiser & Hvitserk - Norway, Pars Tour Agency - Iran, and Amazonas Expeditions River Boat Tours - Brazil.

The small, but unique group of travellers, who share our dreams about experiencing extraordinary adventures, will find easily accessible tour operators on our website.

By connecting adventure seeking globetrotters with advanced tour operators, we make our website work as an efficient, niche oriented, market place.

Through the website, Travel Explorations, our associated tour operators achieve benefits from:
• Targeting promotion to reach people with passion for special kind of travelling - not a general newspaper or a general travel guide which lack a clear profile and focus.
• Eager travellers searching for inspiration and tour offers.
• Advertisers supported directly by inspiring articles and travel tales which give strong credibility and goodwill.
• High visibility for our business partners with central placement of advertisements and with extended opportunities for company presentations combined with text and photos. 
• Many articles, travel tales, photos and videos produced by the editors and our network of journalists that give strong credibility. This is done instead of reproducing information and directing users to other websites through links.

After four years with continuous development of our website, we chose another publishing tool and simultaneously renewed our website. So we launched Travel Explorations again. This time we made it more widespread.

It brought us in the media spotlight. Previous year (2004) we were interviewed by the Norwegian National Broadcasting (NRK) on radio, and so we become in the top news on the world famous webportal ExplorersWeb.

In the future, we will continue to explore more of the world with open mind and curiosity, both from our own travelling and cover of others amazing journeys and expeditions. We hope to inspire more people to experience untouched and exciting places where they could get the feeling of being on "the top of the world".

We continue to grow our business by attracting more adventure seeking globetrotters to our website, and add value for our associated tour operators.

For tour operators who would like to promote their special tour offers through our website, please contact us on e-mail stein@TravelExplorations.com.

Stein Morten Lund, 22 April 2005

Additional information
We in Travel Explorations would like to thanks the following persons for helpful comments with writing this story about our company:

• Espen Holm, Oslo, Norway (specialist in storytelling)
• Martha Kjølseth, Oslo, Norway

Storytelling - a useful technique for promoting your company, products and services
Espen Holm, Norway, is specialized in storytelling. He has written 5 books about the subject.

Espen has learned his profession at Emerson School of Storytelling in London and at Norsk Fortellerforum (Norwegian forum for storytellers). 

He holds presentations and courses about storytelling, and he assists companies in writing and telling their stories. Not just writing the stories, but also telling them verbally - without manuscripts. See Espen`s website Elixir Publishing: www.elixirbok.no .

Contact Espen Holm for advice or for ordering his books (both in Norwegian and English) on e-mail: espen@elixirbok.no.

Travel writing for inspiration:
One of the world`s first travel writers was Marco Polo (1254-1324). He was an explorer from Venice who spent 24 years living in and travelling through Asia. Marco Polo was one of the first Europeans to journey into Mongolia and China and became a close confidant of Kublai Khan, ruler of the Mongol Empire. When he returned home, he wrote about his travels along the Silk Road to China.

In a time when that region of the world was almost completely unknown, Marco Polo's account of the people, places, cultures and customs of Asia fascinated the Western world, although not everyone believed his incredible stories.