| Competition Guidelines - Local Guides and Services |
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Help Local Guides and Services win and get recognition!To give you the best possible chance of giving local guides and services the recognition they deserve, any time you recommend or review them between now and 30th September 2010, they will automatically be entered into the competition.[1] Local guides and services are too often the unsung heroes of travel experiences, and yet are the ones fondly remembered for offering unique and authentic insights into local cultures. More information about how to use Leap Local is here . Frequently asked competition questions How many winners are there? Six! Choosing six winners allows for greater uncertainty to be acceptable in a competition that is difficult to judge with certainty. This reduces the pressure to absolutely identify a top winner, when in practice candidates often possess different merits of equal value. What do we offer the winning guides and services? Our main prize to winners is publicity, which is invaluable for local guides and services to find new business. This starts with Leap, with features in our newsletter and in spotlights online. We received an enormous boost to our online activity as a result of publicity stimulated by the competition e.g. last year we received full-spread coverage in both the Guardian in the UK and The Globe & Mail in Canada, plus were ranked the 15th best travel website in the world by the Independent. We also take the unusual step of generating local press for our winners in their country of residence e.g. front page of the Fiji Times, Living in Peru, The National (Abu Dhabi), Kerala Tourism Magazine. PR was also translated for foreign media e.g. Arequipa Info. Additional online coverage was generated by competition partners including Make Travel Fair, Green Traveller, and Your Safe Planet (now Trip Bod). Last year we also sent each of our winners’ certificates and material they could use for self-promotion, in addition to prizes sponsored by Go Outdoors. We will make announcements about sponsors over the course of the competition. Why is this competition important? In developing countries in particular, local guides and services can find it difficult to prove their credibility to tourists, and so make a livelihood. This can be especially challenging when competing with well resourced foreign owned tourist companies. Too often local communities in tourist areas miss out on tourism opportunities as a result. We try and redress this balance, and offer tourists the information they need to build confidence in going local. If you are a local guide or service, can you recommend yourself? Yes you can, but you should follow this up with reviews from customers. Since users of our site can see who recommends you, they will know it is a self-recommendation. People want to use guides and services who have positive reviews from fellow travellers. How is the competition judged? We have introduced a scoring system which alleviates the need to define precisely ‘what makes a good local guide or service’. We recognise that people look for different things in a ‘local guide or service’. We embrace this fact to judge all round the best local guides or services from the information available. By working with several judges who have expertise in this area, we rely on them to rank the guides and services. We expect there to be clear leaders and losers in the ranks, with a ‘grey’ area in the middle. The ‘grey’ is then debated by our judges. Who are the judges? We will be announcing our judges over the course of the competition. You can see last year’s judges here, many of whom are involved in this year’s competition. What does it mean to be a local? Usually this refers to people who live in the tourist area, and who have years of local knowledge as a result. The main question to ask – do they benefit the local area and community?[2] While foreign investment has a role, we are interested in hearing about individuals who are involved from the local area. Any other questions? Please post them on facebook and twitter and we’ll try to get back to you. Otherwise contact us here. Join us on Follow us on  [1] All recommendations and reviews should be non-fictional [2] Unfortunately this is a tricky question to answer definitively, we know since we’ve asked the experts. However intuitively it is much more straight forward. And besides, that’s why we have a spread of judges with a surprising amount of local knowledge. Add this page to your favourite Social Bookmarking websites:         |