Today, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sam Daams of Travellerspoint.com which went live in August of 2002, giving travellers worldwide an international meeting point. Started by Samuel and Peter Daams, two brothers who had been travelling since birth thanks to parents working in the South Pacific, the site has grown to more than 80,000 members from over 230 countries.

What inspired you to create Travellerspoint.com?

The corny answer? A passion for travelling of course!

Over an online chat session with my brother, co-founder Peter, we came up with the idea of creating a site where travellers could be reunited with old travel friends they had lost touch with. As travellers who had been travelling our entire lives, we had personal experience with this and it seemed like a simple idea that should work.

From this it grew to become a travel community with several complementing services designed to assist travellers at all stages of their trip, but the original functionality is still one of the most rewarding to see in action. Just this week we got an email from someone who had been reunited with a travel friend from a different country after 31 years

If you could visit any destination in the World where would you visit, and why?

Tough question! But I’d have to go with Antarctica. Most other countries are easier to get to, so if I could choose and money was no object, this would be my dream destination. Not just a cruise where you see the ice, but actually a real visit where you set up camp on the ice, watch the emperor penguins etc.

What feature of Travellerspoint.com excites you?

At the moment it’s got to be our new travel mapping feature! It features all those buzz words that make people tick right now like AJAX, geotagging and mashups (although we’re probably one of the few not using Google or Yahoo maps as the mapping base), but the bottom line for us is that the function works nicely for users. And feedback so far has been great!

My particular favourite use of the function is, when including a map in a blog, that the blogger can zoom in on some tiny island or city to show exactly where the blog entry was written. The map still remains interactive in this view though, giving readers of the blog a great way to visualize the entire trip around that particular entry by zooming out or clicking on one of the photos or tripstops.

I also get excited about things like our customizable home page (dragging and dropping content online just feels so much cooler!), including videos in blogs, moblogging or the fact that bloggers can update their own designs through CSS. 5 years ago I would hardly think these things possible, so it just excites me to think of where we and the industry as a whole can be in another 5 years!

Which figure in the travel industry past or present inspires you?

Abel Tasman. It’s just so impressive how he could have missed Australia but still hit Tasmania (this was over 100 years before Captain Cook though, so why he is still credited as discovering Australia is beyond me)!

What do you think the travel industry should do to help the environment?

Educate the public at large more. Efforts of late by the likes of Richard Branson & Lonely Planet have been great and generated a lot of publicity making people start to ask all the right questions, but more still needs to be done. Travelling is great and can have benefits of it’s own for the environment in terms of awareness and understanding that are hard to measure, but a lot of travellers aren’t aware of the ‘footprint’ they are leaving.

Is Travel 2.0 hype or has it made a positive impact on the travel industry?

A lot of it is absolute hype, but that’s not to say the technology that is associated with travel 2.0 hasn’t made a positive impact. For example social networking on travel sites helps generate a lot of understanding for other cultures, countries and people.

Travel blogs not only help inspire other travellers, but give them a personal insight into these facets that they’ve never had before. Unfortunately the travel/web 2.0 term is used too loosely, primarily in hopes of attracting some part of the huge investment bubble that is so reminiscent of web 1.0, and the hype that is associated with the term isn’t realistic in most travel websites cases. It’s great for users right now, but don’t get too attached to great looking travel sites with no business model!

Thank you Sam, and all the best for 2007.

• First stop for backpackers
• TravBuddy launch Travel Mapping feature
• Travel 2.0 - Let the people speak
• Travellerspoint 2.0 continued

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