The Industry way – The world’s a big place… To plan trips, we need to amass a lot of regional expertise. But that’s expensive, and this is a business.  How to go about collecting regional expertise quickly and cheaply? The answer is two-fold. First of all, ignore broad regional expertise, and reduce your ambitions to narrow regional touristic expertise. Eg, you can know remarkably little about Morocco, but you can memorise the unique selling points of the top 15 hotels in the Marrakech Medina. You can learn about the different ways of getting to and from the airport. And how should you do that? There exist lots of trade channels for teaching “tourism expertise”. Many of them preclude the necessity of actually going anywhere: newsletters, agency affiliations, online education arrangements. There are trade shows where you go and enjoy 10-minute speed-dating sessions with representatives from hotels and suppliers to ‘learn’ about their properties and services. And then of course there’s actual travel, notably ‘FAM trips’ (familiarisation trips) where a local wholesaler invites agents and salespeople on fast, fixed itineraries, to see hotels and to do  a few excursions. Don’t get us wrong, some of these can be truly great. And if you take 150 of them and they add up to a serious basket of experience. But take one, and as far as the travel industry is concerned, now you’re a Morocco “expert”. Except that you’re not. You’re just really not. Interestingly, within the industry, people don’t say “I’m an expert”, perhaps because everyone would know it’s not true. They say “I sell a lot of Morocco”. We say barf.

The Trufflepig way. For a start, we don’t talk about research, we talk more broadly about expertise. It’s our responsibility to grow and nurture the broad expertise of our planners. A big part of that of course is on the ground, visiting hotels and such – developing the touristic expertise mentioned above. But that’s just the baseline, and beyond that we actively subsidise and encourage our planners in developing broad, regional expertise, looking outside the world of tourism, developing contacts in the arts, the world of journalism, local business owners, friends of friends… i.e. making connections and doing actual research. Dig into The Sounder and you’ll get a sense of what I’m talking about. On top of that, many of them live in (or come from) the regions which they plan for. At Trufflepig, our research budget is second only to our salary budget. Nothing else compares. It’s crazy. It makes no financial sense. Or does it.