Wednesday night, we officially celebrated GetYourGuide’s launch at the Dozentenfoyer of ETH Zurich and announced the winners of this year’s Tour de Suisse competition. It was a very tight race, but in the end, Marina’s “Urchiges Appenzellerland” won the price. Congratulations and have fun traveling ;-)

The complete final ranking can be found on the Tour de Suisse page. At this point we would also like to thank our sponsors Facebook, Orange, Local.ch, MySwitzerland and Travel.ch for helping to set up this unique contest. We had a great time watching these innovative contributions being submitted and really enjoyed this final evening, when we got to see the people behind the entries.

Here are some impressions of the award ceremony:

Introducing the 20 finalists, who won the popular vote

Michel receiving his prize “A Ski-Weekend at Bettmeralp” from MySwitzerland

Isabelle Banner from Local.ch (left) awards Barbara Odermatt (right) with an iPhone for her fourth place tour

Travel.ch CEO Roland Zeller awards the “Facebook Dream Holiday” to Marina

Acknowledging Tour de Suisse’s main sponsor: Facebook!

People gathering around Orange’s stand. Their slogan is our motto: Internet Everywhere ;-)

]]> http://blog.getyourguide.com/2008/11/30/tour-de-suisse-results/feed/ http://blog.getyourguide.com/2008/11/30/tour-de-suisse-results/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/getyourguide/~3/455725847/ http://blog.getyourguide.com/2008/11/17/tour-de-suisse-finals/#comments Mon, 17 Nov 2008 08:09:58 +0000 Johannes http://blog.getyourguide.com/?p=245 Dear Friends,

after an amazing race we have seen over the last two months, voting on Tour de Suisse has finally come to an end this saturday night. Cusquix’s “100% Valais, Hike & Gastro” won the popular vote (678 votes), followed by Dani’s “Airboard in Filzbach” (575 votes) and rolf’s “Bezaubernde Schneeschuhtour im Mythengebiet” (553 votes).

Next a jury will evaluate the top 20 tours (be aware that we do not count second tours in the Top 20 that were submitted by the same guide - no one can win more than one prize!) and select the winners of the prizes. The results of the final round will be announced at the awards ceremony on November 26th, 19:00h at the main building of ETH Zurich (Rämistr.101, Zurich), “Dozentenfoyer” (Restaurant on the highest level with a view all over Zurich).

The contributions have been fantastic in quality and now we are really looking forward seeing the results of your great efforts. The jury evaluating the entries and picking the winners will consist of the following experts:

- Angela Zäh, Javier Olivan (Facebook)

- Roland Zeller (Travel.ch)

- Isabelle Banner (Local.ch)

- Alfonso Llopart (MySwitzerland.com)

- Andreas Güntert (Schriftzug.ch)

In the aftermath of the event, there will be snacks and drinks for everyone and the chance to chat with some of the people involved in GetYourGuide. We would be happy, if you would find the time to come by. Please drop us a note to info (at) getyourguide.com, if you intend to come and we add you to the guest list.

One of the contest sponsors of GetYourGuide’s Tour de Suisse is Bettmeralp. Many people have asked us about where Bettmeralp is located and what you can do there, which is why we decided to release a special Blog post on this great place. Bettmeralp is located in Valais and is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site Jungfrau-Aletsch-Bietschhorn.

The sun-spoiled village of Bettmeralp is situated at 2,000 meters (6,561 ft) above sea level and is a perfect holiday destination, as you can combine nature and sports. Whether you take varied hiking tours in summer or enjoy unforgettable skiing days in winter, Bettmeralp, the family-friendly and car-free village, provides the perfect framework for carefree and relaxing days far away from routine and the hectic pace of the world.

A very special point to Bettmeralp is that families are really a core element of the philosophy. Bettmeralp aims to provide a vacation according to the needs of kids and their parents or accompanying persons. Welcoming families is at the heart of what they do and is not just a marketing gag. It is also supported by the undersigned tourism service providers and by local residents. In line with the needs of the families at their vacation destination, Bettmeralp recognizes the quality criteria that are required by each resort, and which are checked periodically by independent experts. They guarantee to stick to the quality criteria and constantly endeavor to improve family offers and incorporate new ideas.

If you are looking for a good place to spend your winter vacation at - check it out! There are several good deals for hotels and ski passes on the Bettmeralp website.

while our competition Tour de Suisse is still not even half finished, we have seen many new people coming to our site and sharing tours. Although this might sound not very spectacular to you, it is certainly special to us, as it means that the framework that we have been created during many hours of hard work withing the past couple of months is used in a creative manner. We believe that there is no better thing for creative people than to step aside the project you are working on for a brief second and see how others engage with it.

The hypothesis that underlies GetYourGuide is that there is a vast potential in tourism that is unrealised due to tideous constraints and fragmentations that have been dominating the business for many years. Seeing how you create interesting contributions to travel and international connectivity pushes me to think that we can turn around this single sided state of things. We believe that we can make a difference and help people travel in a richer way than they did before, seeing things on their travels from different perspectives.

Tour de Suisse is a competition that seeks people to design and submit creative tours in Switzerland. After the first couple of weeks, we have already seen several that I would immediatly judge to qualify for these criterions. However, let this be only a beginning of what we are able to accomplish. With your help, we all will be able to grow this website and achieve something very unique. But most importantly - to have fun doing so!

Best,

The GetYourGuide Team

Tour de Suisse offers to everyone living in Switzerland to post innovative and original tours that allow visitors to experience the country from a different perspective than when traveling on the standard touristic paths. The contest runs until November 15th and everyone can vote on the tours through an application that we designed on Facebook.

Facebook is a terrific social community that allows users to integrate APIs on their platform and make use of the powerful social graph. In our case users may create tours and then invite their friends to vote for them using Facebook. Once a friend cast a vote, the friends’ frind will see this in his/her newsfeed and may also vote for the tour. Thus, within few cycles, a creative and convincing entry to the contest may rise to the top of the competition and win one of our amazing prizes.

On November 15th midnight, the top 20 (with most votes) will qualify for the final round. In the final round a pannel of experts decides, who will take home the prizes and who is going to win the “Tour de Suisse”.

The GetYourGuide team is very much looking forward a lot to the next 2 months and we hope that the users have as much fun participating in the contest, as we had creating it. We believe it is a great opportunity for everyone in Switzerland to cause some awareness for the beauty and the endless opportunities in the country.

Andres already has a variety of cool tours online and is about to get more Hungarian guides online within the next weeks. My favorite one so far is obviously the Holloko and Eger wine tour ;-)

What really attracts me in his tours are all the beautiful landscapes. I have been to Poland and the Czech Republic recently and although both countries were really wonderful, so I am all about exploring Eastern Europe in the next years. Having great guides now in Hungary, there are even fewer reasons, why not to go as soon as possible :-)

By the way, once Andres sent me an E-Mail in Hungarian as a CC and I think there has never been a European language where I was so clueless. I really understood nothing apart from “GetYourGuide” :-)

Here is a picture of the gorgeous lake Balaton

And here is Andres from Budapesttours

Actually we’re experiencing web 2.0 globalization: a common event in Spain organized by young people found its way to Switzerland through facebook.

…next day:

the text above is really unique and cool, as Philipe wrote it on his iPhone, while having a beer in the other hand. As said above, it was extremely remarkable to see what social communities can do. Obviously many people will complain about this Facebook event and for sure there will be another “young people are much worse than 25 years ago” debate. However, to me it is more of a sign that people are actually eager to come together and celebrate, which is in itself a very positive purpose. Seeing the crowd dancing and having fun, I really couldn’t understand why so many respected officials called the attending people “brain sickos” (hahaha!). But I guess it is always fantastic, if you can complain about something in order to not have to deal with your own boring life.

In any case, we had lots of fun (and some beers) and got to talk to a bunch of different people. I would be ready for another Botellon next weekend and am definitely looking forward to see more community organized meetings in the future. Prost!

This one is for Esther:

watch?v=HJyEJtAg0ZY

If you wonder what mountains are depicted on the picture, here is the answer: The big dark wall in the middle is the Eiger Nordwand (famous for being one of the most difficult climbs in the Alps). Right behind it, you can see the Mönch, which is another 4000+ glacier. To the right of this great duo, you see the Jungfrau, arguably the most famous mountain in the Bernese Alps. The lake in the next picture is the Brienzer See and the city you see further down the valley is Interlaken.

I hope I could stimulate some sentiment of desire to go hiking. There are no words on how beautiful some of the sceneries here are. We already have some great tours to enjoy the scenery on GetYourGuide. In the high end there are the plane and helicopter rides, which allow you to take the bird’s perspective on some of the worlds most gorgeous sights. For those who like altitudes, but rather want to be a little bit more athletic, there are great paragliding tours (e.g. Gleitschirmschule or Aerocenter). Apart from that you will find some canyioning, rafting and other tours. Have fun looking around and enjoy those great days of summer. I hope they won’t end…

The Chinese travel market is huge. Domestic travel takes the lion’s share of the market with over 1 billion travelers per year although inbound travel with 50 million travelers in 2006 (WTO) and outbound travel with 41 million travelers in 2007 (ChinaContact Outbound Travel Handbook) are no slouch either. The WTO predicts that by 2020, China will become the biggest travel reception country and fourth largest outbound travel country in the world. Inbound travel is favoured by the government because it brings in foreign exchange.

There is huge potential for online travel but also barriers. According to Web 2.0 Travel Tools the Chinese online travel market, valued at US$204 million and growing at a breathtaking speed (72% in 2006), is still puny compared to the American market (US$83 billion in 2006). The biggest obstacle seems to be online payment as Chinese are still wary about online transactions and the use of credit cards. This, however, should change over time as both consumer perceptions changes and Alipay, the Chinese version of PayPal, is becoming more and more widespread. We also noticed that Chinese still like to use the phone. Pretty ladies with phone receivers in their hands take up the best real estate on most Chinese travel websites. It says something if Ctrip, the leading online travel giant in China with over fifty percent market share, also operates the largest call center in Asia’s travel industry. Not surprisingly, the most common form of booking a trip in China is still via calling a local travel agent.

Chinese are bargain hunters. Two of the most successful online travel sites are vertical search engines akin to Kayak: Kuxun and Qunar (Chinese for “Where to”). The latter even boasts cool features such as tracking and predicting prices over time.

Adding a social touch. China Web 2.0 Review compared a few travel 2.0 websites last year and it seems that there is still huge potential for travel websites with a social touch in China. In the meantime, online forums still dominate the internet landscape. 

Western companies don’t have it easy here. There are licenses for everything and in most cases cooperation with local partners is mandatory for success. We also noticed that marketing strategies which may work abroad, may not necessarily work in China. After pretty much botching a campus promotion campaign at several Beijing universities, we went back to the drawing board and came up with other promotion measures that would most certainly fail in Europe. But we are consoling ourselves that even Google is having a hard time here.

Tens of billions of dollars have been spent, hundreds of thousands of police, soldiers and volunteers have been mobilised, and more than 4 billion people are expected to follow the Olympics on TV. With an event of such magnitudes coming up, let’s take a look at some of the other superlatives surrounding the Beijing Olympics so far.

Most surprising: Olympic village facilities. There are many things to love about China but clean facilities is not usually one of them. Surely, the authorities gave their all but to hear statements such as “best Olympic village I have visited” from Norbert Littkopf, a six-time Olympic Games attendee and coach of the German female judo team, is still positively surprising.

Most problematic: Weather and environment. Be it the terrible heat or the still-not-so-great air quality, athletes are going to have a hard time beating world records under these conditions. Despite adding more and long overdue subway lanes and implementing an odd/even faceplate rule for cars, there are still too many cars on the road.

Biggest fear: Rain on the day of the opening ceremony. Despite sophisticated chemical gadgetry to prevent rainfall one can’t help but to imagine the disastrous consequences a major downpour would have on the multi-million dollar publicity event directed by movie director Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, Hero).

Under most pressure: Liu Xiang. Nowadays you can’t walk 100m in Beijing without seeing the face of 2004 Athens man’s 110m hurdles winner and the bearer of the hope of an entire nation. For a country without a single Olympic track and field gold medal until 2004, Liu Xiang was a first. Add the two facts that his world record was just beaten this year by Cuban national Dayron Robles (12.87s) and that Li Xiang himself has failed to break 13 seconds this year, you probably wouldn’t want to be in his shoes right now. Fortunately, he’s not only fast but also a smart guy: he doesn’t read the news and when interviewed about his goals for the Games, he said he just wants to “have some fun.”

Most disappointing: Inbound travel. Tight visa regulations have caused a lack of foreign travelers. This has forced hotels and tour operators to bring prices back to sane levels.

Most innovative: Style guides. Chinese are not famous for their sense of aesthetics, so this latest action by the Chinese government to distribute an etiquette and style guide to over 4 million Chinese households is both innovative and, most likely, futile.

Most cheesy: Chinese flags on cars. A friend of mine derived a simple rule of thumb: the cheaper the car, the more eye-catching the flag will be. Whether that is due to a correlation of income level and nationalistic fervour, or merely for decorative reasons, I do not know.

Most hopeful: Sports. Now that the political and journalistic overtures are coming to a close, I hope the Olympics Games will finally shift its focus towards its original purpose, the celebration of sports. And lucky me who got tickets for the track and field finals.