Travel Matters – About Us
travelmatters is an independent travel agency in South West London and opened in 1998. Based in what has been dubbed “Nappy Valley” for having the highest percentage of under-fives in the whole of the UK, the independent travel agency has always specialized in family holidays. At Travel matters, you’ll receive personal travel advice for your family holidays. We organise everything from short breaks to honeymoons and other tailormade itineraries.
The idea of promoting more “ethical ” holidays in our Make Travel Matter section, came from Karen’s passion of travelling and CONNECTING with a community. Here at Travel Matters , we want to make your travel matter, we want the travel experience to be complete with the involvment of learning from the local community. We help you organise a holiday with HEART in it, meeting the people, experiencing their culture, respecting their country and land.
Make Travel Matter promotes travel as a privilege. Karen’s aim is to encourage people to make travel matter and be more aware of the holiday choices. The campaign sets out to demonstrate how our behaviour, when we travel, can make such a difference to the people and places we visit and spend our holidays in.
Karen
travelmatters was Karen’s first baby fourteen years ago. She has always enjoyed organising the perfect family holiday. Since then, she juggles travel and family life, with the arrivals of Alice, aged 10 and Elsie, aged 7. Her experience is wide and varied including taking old people around Europe with Page and Moy, hosting double-decker bus tours with Top Deck travel and running her own tour operating programme in Portugal. She can also be found slipping from English into fluent French, German or Portuguese, often helping in those tricky hotel booking negotiations! The last couple of years she has visited Thailand, South Africa, Mexico, Cyprus, France, Eygpt and five Caribbean islands. Follow me on Twitter
Catherine
Catherine started working in travel 18 years ago, having found that it was her ideal job. She had spent time backpacking and travelling around the world, so getting the opportunity to explore more of the world and get paid to talk about it, made perfect sense. She is not really a beach person but has sat and watched many a sunrise and sunset on beaches as far as the Maldives to the Brazilian coast. She loves to explore temples, markets, cities and eating most exotic foods. Her destination knowledge is wide and varied from trekking the Inca trail to bagging bananas on a banana farm in Israel. She has huge soft spot for Mickey Mouse. This year alone she has visited Jordan, Iceland, Cyprus, the US, Greece and South Africa.
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Contributors to Travel Matters
Veronica Tonge
Veronica Tonge loves the mountains! She is an avid skier having skied in over 50 resorts across Europe, the United States and Canada and has visited at least as many in the summer months for hiking. She enjoys visiting small, authentic mountain villages that have retained a real community and experiencing the many other winter activities besides skiing. As a foodie, and rather partial to the odd schnapps, she relishes the opportunity to try all the local delicacies! Her professional background is in international website development, project management and marketing with companies in varying areas of tourism including; online consumer travel, business travel and the hotel industry. The challenge of managing mountain resorts both for the benefit of the locals and the environment has always interested her and led to her obtaining a Masters in Responsible Tourism Management and writing a thesis on skiing and responsible tourism. She has since worked with national tourist boards, written about skiing for the national press and worked with the International Centre for Responsible Tourism.
She is the founder of www.responsibleskiing.com and is dedicated to ensuring that people have a great winter holiday experience – whilst treasuring the mountain environment. “Responsible Skiing is not about easing your guilt and is not just concerned with CO2 emissions. It’s about engaging with the mountain destination, enjoying a range of winter activities in beautiful surroundings, and having a fun and memorable stay, but not at the cost of the environment or the local population. And we all want that.”
Jim Grover
I am passionate about travel and photography…having caught both bugs a little late in my life. I am very fortunate to work for a global company which sends me around the world and it is this, supplemented by typical family travel, that enables me to indulge in my passion. Whenever I now travel ‘on business’ I always endeavour to squeeze a couple of days of week-end leisure time into my agenda to explore local everyday life with my camera.
In 2010, for example, the combination of business and family holidays took me to 12 countries in Asia, the Americas, the middle-east, and Europe. My favourite locations are the less economically developed countries, especially those in Asia, and I love visiting India, China, and Vietnam where the friendliness of the local people, the richness and diversity of colours, and the fact that life is truly lived on the streets, make them wonderful places to experience.
My particular passion is street photography, capturing images of everyday life as well as portraits of the locals. Whenever I visit a new location my first question is always where’s the local street or food market’?’ as I have always found these are terrific step-off points for whatever the week-end has in store for me. They also give an immediate sense of how willing the locals are to have their photos taken.
I have found that it’s amazing what you can experience with a bit of curiosity and ambition (and a smattering of confidence!), even in just a few days in any country around the world. And because I never know what I am going to experience…there’s always an element of surprise. So a recent visit to Syria resulted in me being invited into traditional bread bakeries to watch local bakers at work, a local biscuit factory, an enormous new mosque under construction, and a children’s school. A visit to Dubai took me into a local dockyard, a bustling harbour, a local fish market, and resulted in me climbing into an enormous hand-built dhow under construction.
For those interested in the photography side of my life, I’ll typically take a couple of SLR bodies and half a dozen lenses. But this isn’t necessary…it’s just what I choose to do. With today’s camera technology you can take amazing images even with relatively humble ‘point and shoots’. In fact it can be a disadvantage having lots of kit. Not only is it heavy but it quickly labels you as a ‘pro’ and some locations only let ‘pros’ take images if they have a permit (as happened to me when recently photographing the Moscow Metro), or people expect money if you take images of them (which I hate doing, and try to avoid as it takes the spontaneity away – - although I will usually have a bag of sweets with me, though, to dish out to local children).
Thomas Armitt
During my 4 years at university, whilst doing a degree in Marketing and French, I had the opportunity to spend a year in Senegal researching the possibility of developing community based ecotourism and how to market it to the UK. Thanks to this experience, I developed a passion for responsible tourism, and decided to create West Africa Discovery. Currently I am doing an MSc in Responsible Tourism Management and have just come back from Sierra Leone where I conducted some research on the potential for implementing and developing the concept of responsible tourism.
Our Company Values at Travel Matters
The director and staff of Travel Matters are committed to work in ways which are responsible and environmentally friendly as possible. In the office the following guidelines are followed.
1. Rubbish:
» Is recycled;
» Other rubbish to be put in general bins;
» Encourage suppliers to not use so much packaging for deliveries.
2. Office Supplies:
» Print and photocopy on both sides of paper;
» Re-use paper only used on one side, e.g. as scrap notepaper, or to print on;
» Using our website as our main source of client information also reduces paper usage dramatically;
» Keeping documents down to the minimum if possible, e.g. if document goes on to a a third page, consider
reducing typeface to keep on 2 pages;
» No printing of documents which can be proofed just as well on screen as on paper;
» Email memos and requests rather than print;
» Recycle ink cartridges.
3. Natural Resources and Energy:
» Turn off lights and use natural light only when possible;
» Turn off heaters when not needed. Keep heat down to a resonable level;
» Turn off computers and printers at night if not needed;
» Don’t overfill kettle;
» We cycle, walk or or try to use public transport to work;
» We have switched to using Ecotricity for our energy.
4. Fair Trade:
» Buy fair trade tea, coffee, and sugar.
5. Social and community work:
» We endeavour to let local people know about ethical and fair trade travel – e.g. talks to local primary schools and
telling our clients;
» We encourage clients to support our local fund raising and initiatives. We support various school PTAs and donate
funds to the specific schools;
» Travel Matters offers work experience placements to help young people prepare for adult life – collaborated with
BEST – Business and educationg succeeding together;
» We support wildlife and cultural heritage with links on our website;
» Travel Matters is a supporter of the charities Travel Pledge, a charity enabling clients to give back to local community projects overseas and Tourism Concern, which helps bring the benefits of tourism to local people.
Travel Matters encourages all clients to support the Make Travel Matter campaign which plants trees with the charity Trees for Cities. We match your funds to plant a tree when you book your holiday.
