Is this it?!

We’ve been studying, buying, and taking RTW trips for 15 years at BootsnAll. Through all of this, we always wondered why it took so long to get real prices, and why it was virtually impossible to book this type of ticket online. A few years back, we started looking more seriously at this problem. It lead to the launch of Indie. In a nutshell, it’s a RTW travel dream machine that kicks out real prices within seconds, has online booking and makes it dead easy to share and take this sort of trip.

We created a little RTW Ticket Comparison Chart

I’m stoked to finally have something in the marketplace for multi-country travelers. Cheers!

BootsnAll Core Value of “Embrace Change” is nailed in this interview of Seth Godin on a Canadien Talk Show.

I’ve been up late many nights, can’t sleep thinking about what Indie Travel means to me. Today’s article on BootsnAll is fueling more of these thoughts.

Jennifer (author of above article) hits on 5 main points

1) Speed is stressful and stress is killing us
2) It’s not a contest
3) Go deep instead of wide
4) Be Present
5) Understanding Takes time

She diggs into all 5 above. I’ve always been in touch with #2, and the past few years been embracing 1, 3, 4, and 5. Great stuff and thought provoking.

Brandy and I just booked a ticket to New Zealand for this winter. We’ll be going Deep instead of wide in Ohope Beach, New Zealand for 100 days.

We’ve been mentioned and linked to many times over the years, from blogs, to websites, to the folks at CNN, WSJ and other MSM folks. It’s always a pleasure to be regarded as an expert in one area or another.

CNN featured some of our content last friday: Gadgets for the Road.

An interesting sidenote on it from a traffic perspective, even though our site is linked prominently in the flash display of the article/feature, it has driven only 22 visitors to Travel Gear Blog since the article almost 6 days ago. When I clicked the link, the firefox pop-up blocker stopped my browser from opening the window. Oh well.

If you know me, some of the other folks at BnA, or BootsnAll – maybe you’ll find this funny like I did.

I just calculated today. 23 straight days of work. I don’t do this as much as the early days, but it is still a lot of fun to pound it out once in awhile. We’ve had year-end meetings and I have been flying around the US for conferences and meetings. Lotsa fun it has been.

At our BnA.com year-end – we talked about the Community a lot. Here is what we came up with – the good and the bad. It has been an excellent experience and humbling to hear back from folks that care and participate. Even though we have been doing this for 9+ years, there is still a tonne to improve on.

I got some free tickets to the Portland TrailBlazers game tonight via my insurance guy. Taking my pops for his 60th birthday. If you know him, call or send him an email and tell him he is a good bloke and wish him well.

We’re wrapping up the summer and lotsa vacations this month here at BootsnAll. Here are some exciting projects and excellent travel guides/sites that we have been building this summer in our Portland office.

Check out our new Italy Travel Guide. It is getting near being ready to launch and has loads of information for peeps going to Italy. Well done Jessica.

The Offside Soccer Blog has about 60 blogs on it now. Insane growth and tonnes of passionate soccer bloggers.

Carrie, our Business Travel Blogger has been cranking out interesting posts for almost a year now. Now that I am do “biz travel” quite a bit I find her posts helpful. Maybe you will too.

Cheers – off to Chicago for the weekend. Cubs game on Saturday and Fantasy Football draft on Monday nite.

Who know’s if he was the 1st, but Nick has been travel blogging in Bali, Indonesia for almost 4 years now. Way before Blogs were what they are today. I just had a chat on the phone with him and he is still cranking out the information on Bali.

We have changed the design and platform for his blog about 6 times in the past 4 years. Not easy to be changing that much – but we used BaliBlog as a test platform for a lot of the Travel Logues that we are doing today. I think we have found the platform we are gonna stick with now. (WordPress hacked)

We are linked off the homepage of AOL.com now.  Kinda rad.  See what it looked like here.

(more…)