RealAdventures.com Offers Vacations Outside Of Tradition

RealAdventures.com provides an online directory that consolidates thousands of adventure tour operators. The site covers soft adventure trips to highly challenging endeavors. You can also book components of trips, such as hot air balloon rides and other activities that can be integrated into vacations planned independently.

The site is most valuable for the comprehensive listings it provides, and for ideas for travelers who want to get up and goand stay active.

Source BestFares Magazine
Web Site http//www.BestFares.com

Site 2 See RealAdventures.com

Burned out as I am on too many businesstripsfromhell, I'm anything but an expert when it comes to adventure travel.

If I were to expand my horizons to include nonbusiness travel (as I'm often encouraged to do by wellmeaning friends), then RealAdventures.com website is where I'd begin the journey.

RealAdventures.com provides a single online directory that consolidates thousands of tour operators. RealAdventures.com has created an adventure travel and vacation planning search engine. Choose destination characteristics and the site delivers a list of packages which meet your requirements.

Looking for something exotic but cheap, I found a 1week stay in Goa, India, for $130, including 2 vegetarian meals per day and instruction in various local arts and crafts. Accommodations are provided by a local family, with classes (if you choose to take them) run by local artists and crafts people.

One quibble the site loaded very slowly on the several occasions I accessed it. But maybe that's just part of the adventure.

Source The FrequentFlier.com
Web Site http//www.FrequentFlier.com

Founder of RealAdventures.com a Travel Enthusiast

By Junko Kaji, Boston Digital Industry
To get an idea of what Vik Kachoria is all about, just ask him what he's planning to do on his next vacation. &quotI'd love to go on a bike tour through Europe,&quot says the 37yearold CEO and founder of RealAdventures.com, a website hawking the joys of adventure travel to the online community. &quotOr maybe I'll go on a parasailing tripthose sound like a lot of fun. And I'd like to do some camping, too.&quot Obviously, here's one CEO who has no trouble at all living up to his company's slogan &quotLife's an adventure, live it!&quot

Kachoria has never been a stranger to the peripatetic life. &quotI was born in a rural village in remote India,&quot he recalls, &quotwhere there was no electricity, no roads, no trees, and they still fetched water on camels.&quot When he was three, however, his doctor father moved the family first to England, then to the United States, where they lived in such diverse locations as Augusta (Ga.), Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, and Rochester, N.Y. &quotMy dad loved to travel, and he took a lot of professional opportunities in different cities,&quot Kachoria explains. &quotThat's probably part of where I got my own penchant for travel.&quot

After getting a combined math and physics degree from BU in 1984, Kachoria decided to do a little roaming of his own before returning to the area to start a lucrative job with a large semiconductor company based in Massachusetts. However, the nine weeks he and a friend spent backpacking around Europe and northern Africa caused a complete change of life plan. &quotI left my friend in Egypt to come back for the job,&quot says Kachoria, &quotbut I only lasted two days. Nothing wrong with the jobI was just horrified at the thought of spending the next 60 years of my life in a cubicle.&quot With no savings, Kachoria bought a plane ticket to Australia on his credit card, and left the country two weeks later.

That was the start of an eighteenmonth odyssey through Australia, New Zealand, Southern Asia, and Europe, as Kachoria hitchhiked his way through the countryside doing odd jobs to earn spending money. He did everything from picking strawberries (&quotonly for a dayit hurt my back too much&quot), laying dynamite lines, hunting kangaroos, and mining opals in New South Wales. All in all, Kachoria estimates that he covered about 30,000 kilometers in one and a half years.

&quotThe hardest part about that kind of traveling,&quot says Kachoria wryly, &quotis reentry.&quot

Prompted by a nagging sense of responsibility, Kachoria eventually returned to the States and started work as a computer consultant. But although he founded and sold two successful companies, earned an MBA from Boston University in 1996, and worked in the mergers and acquisitions field, Kachoria's thoughts kept returning to adventure travel. Finally, in 1998, Kachoria came up with the idea for RealAdventures.com, a Webbased business that would allow him to merge his love of rugged travel with his professional life.

RealAdventures.com currently sports over 4500 listings of everything from local weekend getaways to safaris and llama treks in Africa and the Middle East. &quotWe are trying to consolidate the wide range of travel experiences that people are interested in into a single online travel community,&quot says Kachoria, who designed the site himself. &quotA lot of travel sites are focused very narrowly on one thingaccomodations, for example, or skiing, or hiking. We plan to distinguish ourselves by offering a lot of things in one place, so a person doesn't have to scour the Web every time he or she wants to do something new.&quot

Because Kachoria has been &quotreally focused&quot on getting the company up and running in recent months, he hasn't had time to do very much of the kind of rugged travel that his site promotes. But for now, he's content with bringing that opportunity to others via the Web. &quotAdventure travel will challenge, inspire and motivate the explorer in everyone,&quot says Kachoria. &quotWhether it is your first adventure trip or tenth, you'll take home a lifetime of memories.&quot

Source Boston Digital Industry
Web Site http//www.DigitalIndustry.net

This Week's Best of the Internet

By Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Staff
RealAdventures is a fullfigured online travel Web site packed with transportation, accommodation and entertainment information to make planning that next trip easier.

The site, which launched in June, has thousands of listings for various vacation plans, from luxurious beach getaways to exotic adventure safaris and grueling mountain climbing excursions.

The site also has postings for longtern getaways. For example, last week the site was promoting a historic property for sale outside Florence in Tuscany, Italy.

RealAdventures also has various travel tools, including a currency converter, a holiday calendar, regional weather data and a global timezone map so vacationers can keep their schedules organized as they cross multiple nations or states. Visitors contact businesses on the site directly, without dealing with reservation or commission charges often hidden in other travelrelated sites.

Source Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Web Site http//www.jsonline.com

AdSense

Real Adventures found ten times more ad revenue with AdSense. Case study RealAdventures www.realadventures.com The phrase &quotserial entrepreneur&quot describes Vik Kachoria perfectly. During the past 20 years, Kachoria who has a degree in physics and math from Boston University and an MBA has worked in M&ampA and business development roles. He has also found the time to start two successful technology companies. His current endeavor, fiveyearold Real Adventures, reflects his passion for worldwide travel. It's an awardwinning vacation planning portal for a wide range of tastes and prices. From romantic bedandbreakfasts to luxury vacation rentals, from bungee jumping to safaris, and from Alaska to Zimbabwe, Real Adventures is a comprehensive resource for travelers around the world. &quotWe're not travel agents or tour operators, and we don't book trips, make reservations or lead tours,&quot says Kachoria. &quotWe help travel companies market their products and services online to a very large and diverse audience of travelers, vacationers and adventure seekers.&quot Working from a small office in Brookline, Mass., he employs a virtual team of eight to solicit and manage paid listings from thousands of businesses featured on the site, and serves over a million monthly page views. Approach &quotIt was easy to get started. It took just a few minutes to place the ads on my pages.&quot As a costconscious entrepreneur, Kachoria is alert to the relationship between effort and benefit. &quotThough I've tried banners, links and other ads on the site, I've never focused much on advertising revenue,&quot he says. &quotFirst, I don't want to clutter up the site second, I don't have a dedicated sales force and third, I never expected the ad revenue from banners and links would be worth the effort.&quot Kachoria got curious about Google AdSense ads when he spotted some on a Czech tourism site. When he learned that AdSense could run ads that closely relate to specific destinations and trips across his site's large number of categories, he decided to give it a try. &quotReal Adventures has a lot of information, but we don't always have all the answers. What is key for us is making our customers happy. My theory was that if I provided relevant, nonintrusive ads for travel destinations and information, then my site would be a more valuable resource to travelers. And a side benefit, I would generate some ad revenue,&quot says Kachoria. &quotAt the beginning I was very concerned I might lose traffic to competitors,&quot says Kachoria, who took a cautious approach. Initially he only used AdSense on a limited number of his site's pages. &quotI watched the stats very carefully. If traffic, pages per visitor or conversion rates dropped I knew I could easily pull the ads,&quot he says. Results &quotSince implementing AdSense, our ad revenue has increased more than tenfold.&quot &quotIt was easy to get started,&quot Kachoria says. &quotIt took just a few minutes to place the ads on my pages.&quot Given his cautious approach, he was eager to see results. &quotI knew and trusted Google's reputation, but did not know how much I'd get paid,&quot he says. &quotFrom the first day, we made a lot more than I had expected.&quot &quotSince implementing AdSense, our ad revenue has increased more than tenfold, compared to past advertising I had tried. And this is without any sales overhead, which in the past didn't leave much profit. Not only is 100 percent of my available inventory sold through AdSense, but it's entirely supplemental income, and significant at that. At last I can focus on our primary business,&quot he says. Kachoria says volume of traffic and revenue per action the two most important indicators of how his business is performing have continued to grow. &quotNot only are more people coming in,&quot he says, &quotbut two months since implementing AdSense, conversion rates are still increasing. So not only does AdSense provide a revenue stream, but it has helped me help my clients.&quot When fellow entrepreneurs share their war stories, Kachoria has a bit of advice &quotI tell them AdSense is a great way to add a significant revenue stream to your website without cluttering it up, for minimal effort, and doing so with a trusted brand name company.&quot About Google AdSense Google AdSense is a program for online businesses, enabling them to earn revenue from serving ads precisely targeted to specific web content and search pages. A broad universe of sites profit from AdSense, with service levels ranging from online signup to dedicated support management. Google's 150,000 advertisers also benefit from AdSense by gaining exposure on sites across the Google Network, including AOL, Ask Jeeves, Lycos and EarthLink.