Travel Guides

I talked a bit with Calan from Mylifeoftravel.com and he agreed to give me an interview, also a review for his site is coming soon.

Hello Calan, can you share some info about you and the team behind Mylifeoftravel?

The team consists of 3 founders, me, Lachlan and Haim, all of which are web developers and travelers. We had worked together on another project in London and had become friends. When I told the guys about the idea for the site we decided it would be fun to build something less corporate for a change, and so we took time off contracting and build the site from my apartment in London.

When did the Mylifeoftravel project start and what are the results so far?

We launched the site at the end of 2005 and have done very little marketing as we ran the site alongside our full-time careers. The site has grown now to having over 25,000 journals and 500,000 photos, and we’ve decided to work on the project full-time.

If it’s not a secret, can you disclose the budget for the entire project?

Technically our budget was pretty low as all 3 founders are senior web developers, so it was more a question of taking 8 months off work to build the project. The main financial cost was an initial marketing budget which never goes as far as you’d like. When you start marketing, even small mistakes are costly when you’re paying for everything yourselves but you go through a learning curve and quickly find out what works and what to avoid.

Any story regarding the name of the site? Was it just a flash or did
something else inspire you?

The name is probably a bit long but we wanted a name that made sense. My Life of Travel appropriately explains what we’re trying to do, and that is to get people to record all their travel experiences. It is their lives of travel that we want to record and that’s the main focus of the site.

A number of sites that have popped up recently have pretty ridiculous names that have nothing to do with creating a travel blog.

What are your goals with Mylifeoftravel?

Until now, we ran the project alongside our formal IT careers. We have now stopped work in order to grow the site and to create partnerships with other travel sites. Our goal is to get more travelers recording their travel lives so they have something to look back on in years to come.

Can you tell more about the features that distinguish Mylifeoftravel from the rest of travel social networks?

We started the website in May 2005 which made us one of the first travel blogging platforms to launch. Our technology focuses on the traveler recording their travel experiences and that’s mainly how we differ in that we don’t crowd the site with reviews and guides that contain mostly useless city info.

Our maps have always been the best- they are fully animated in chronological order to show how each trip was taken. We also have a more usable interface than most sites in that we display how much content is in each entry to prevent users having to click into a post to find it empty. This is done right from the search results pages to ensure you reach informative blogs.

Our journals and entries are very flexible. You can create any number of journal containing any number of entries and can structure this as you see fit for each trip. This is very different to how other sites have done theirs. We also offer a photo gallery and video gallery for each entry.

Our future trip calendar lets users add their upcoming trips and select if they’re looking for partners. Other travelers can then search for people looking for travel partners and contact them through the site message system.

Our private entry sharing is the most secure of all blogging sites. If you make an entry private, nobody can reach that entry unless you add them to your address book and share the entry with them. They need to be a member of the site with a confirmed email address matching the shared address before they can view your entry.

How do you see the travel industry in five years?

Wow that’s a big question. People are always going to travel, it’s in the blood. With rising costs I guess the tendency to travel as often may slow but the industry is very strong. Comparison websites make it easier to obtain good pricing and I think they’ll experience huge growth, as will good booking engines which can offer the traveler an easier experience.

What are your preferences regarding travel destinations and hotels?

It depends on the type of trip I’m doing. When I was younger we did a lot of camping, mainly on fishing trips, but nowadays we tend to go for the more comfortable hotel experience. I’m off to Italy this Saturday to cycle about 1200km and we’re staying in a variety of places, from a couple of hostels to some out-of-town villa’s and one castle which should be fun. I’d like to have seen most of the world within the next 10 years. I prefer active destinations to lying on a beach so anything involving diving, cycling, hiking, sailing, horse riding, etc. would be right up there. Tiger Leaping Gorge in China was breathtaking, sailing around Croatia is fantastic and safaris or diving in South Africa is unbeatable.

What’s the weirdest thing that happened to you on a trip?

To be honest, nothing too strange has happened to me. China in general is a pretty bizarre experience, both in terms of its street food which includes roasted scorpions, crickets and worms, and in how disabled people perform on the streets for money. It’s a very strange place.

Anything else you would like to add?

I’d like to tell people to start creating a record of their travels. It’s so easy to forget the details of our trips, especially a few years later when you only remember the big details. When you create a permanent record, you remember so much more about the experience and it inspires your next adventure. It also lets your friends and family have a long term record of what you’ve been doing, especially for times when you’re living far from home.