Eco Companion

@neilcocker Thanks for the question Neil! We are a discovery platform in that we are a place where travellers can find the world's best sustainable holiday experiences, including lodges, tours and eco-projects. And as well as holidays, travellers can access content relevant to them via our blog, so there's an educational element too. First and foremost though we are a booking engine. What makes us unique, and sets us apart from some of the big players like Expedia etc is our World Rating System, that ranks and sorts experiences based on how sustainable they are. While huge holiday platforms might have reached the 'mass', we want to focus on our micro-niche, serving those travellers that really care about having a positive impact while travelling, and about sustainability. Our experiences too are personalised (such is the nature of the ecotourism industry, which is more complex than the mass tourism market). Really, we are the antithesis of mass tourism providers!

@tazine_bogue Sounds great! Good luck :-)

...and how will this scale?

@vincentdignan Great question! It naturally has in the past always been popular with the higher socio economic groups and older demographics though the problem we solve of reassuring people of how their holiday in nature is really managed is actually felt most by women in their mid 20's. So they're the group we're trying to help inform and empower initially.

@vincentdignan Scale is what this system is made for! It's built on Ruby on Rails so is technically ready. Then the business model itself takes endless inspiration from all the giants of the travel tech industry where we'll continue to build an ever larger network of inspiring sustainable experiences in nature. The more we have the more impact we can create to incentivise the nature tourism industry towards a more sustainable approach!

@nickwsmith Hi Nick, thanks for asking. We have had lots of interest from overseas but for now we are concentrating on the UK market. However, we do have experiences all over the world and are constantly expanding our international clients and worldwide selection of products. This means that everyone from any country can join our network of travellers but at the moment we only accept payment in £. We are looking to add $ and € payment in the future and expand our international audience.

@savvaszortikis Ah thank you very much Savvas!