I just got back from an “amazing race”. Well this is what it felt like to my new wife and me. My wedding was on the 26^th of April 2010 but this was not a wedding with only the normal stress that weddings have. We also had to battle an ash cloud to make it back to South Africa to make our own wedding.

Around the 15^th of April, a day before my fiancé and I where to board a plane and fly out to South Africa from London for our wedding, I was having my hair cut for the last time before the wedding, my barber told me that national airspace over the UK will close to all flights. Now this at that time sounded farcical, an event like this hasn’t happened since war times. Low and behold the 16^th came and passed and we where stuck in London. We where still positive but by Sunday when the general consensuses where that this might last weeks, we realised that we need to start making contingency plans.

With a lot of hocus pocus we managed to make it to South Africa in time for our wedding. Now our story continues after the wedding we where getting ready to go on Honeymoon but we still needed to travel from Botswana to Johannesburg to catch our flight to Thailand. That morning when I was checking my emails I received an email from our travel agent informing us that the political situations in Thailand had changed severely.  This meant we had to change our honeymoon plans in a day while travelling down to Johannesburg.

With some more hocus pocus we manage to change the honeymoon in a day while travelling from Botswana to Johannesburg. These events inspired our topic for this week, as I had to be my own travel agent.

Travel related sites need to be online not only in time of disasters but people are shifting more and more to planning their own travels. This means that if they can’t even find you online when doing research you will not stand a chance of surviving in the changing world.

Now there is more than one way to make sure your travel related services are online but there are only a few that will result in business for your company. We will be discussing some tips and advice on people are becoming their own travel agents and how you need to insure your business is found by these amateur travel agents.