It is important to understand that the ethos of Tourdust is to put you directly in contact with local providers. We think this is great, as it makes sure your money goes to the local economy (after all, they know more about their product than we can ever know). We are in effect a self-policing community and don’t provide any absolute guarantees about the quality of the products on our site.
What we do instead, is provide tools to allow the community to review and rate experiences. We also take great care in checking any providers before they feature on the site. We check they are a valid and trustworthy business and as passionate travellers ourselves, we try to make sure they are all authentic and local businesses.
Due to the variety of experiences on Tourdust, all prices displayed on product pages are guide prices only. We ask the seller to display the price per person per tour, and per room per night for accommodation.
We also ask they display the price in the currency which they wish to receive payment in. Sometimes this will be their local currency, and sometimes an international currency such as US Dollars or Euros. If you are interested in a product, we offer a tool to confirm a total price for your booking.
Depending on the individual operator’s preferences, you will either click through to their site, or make an enquiry through the Tourdust message centre.
Anybody can browse the products on Tourdust, but we ask you to sign up to be able to participate in the community (add reviews, photos, or comment in forums) or to be able to contact sellers through our message centre and make bookings. This helps establish trust and ensures the site doesn’t get spammed.
If you’ve forgotten your user name or password click “Forgotten your password” on the log in page. You will need to provide your email address. We will then send a link to you which will show your username and ask you to reset your password.
On your edit profile page, you can select how you want Tourdust to contact you (or not!). You can choose to be notified if (1) there are updates or special offers from Tourdust, (2) you have new messages in your Tourdust inbox or (3) someone replies to your review or forum post. Please be aware, we will always send you an email if you make a booking on Tourdust.
It is up to you. We think it is great if you add a photo, and write a little about what kind of travel you enjoy. This really helps other travellers when they are reading your reviews. For instance as people passionate about independent travel, we would pay a lot more attention to a review of a rustic beach side hut if it is written by another backpacker, rather than someone who likes luxury hotels.
You can add a review by clicking on the add review button on the relevant product’s page. The seller also has the ability to reply to your review.
If you have some great photos of an experience, please add them. On the relevant product’s page, click “add photo” and you will be guided through the process. We show non-standard crops of photos on Tourdust because we think they look better. Luckily we have a nice and simple cropping mechanism, which gives you a choice of three crops of your photo. Every time we try it, we think it makes our photos look better, but then we’re not great photographers… If it doesn’t work for you, try a different photo!
Any member can join in forums. All we ask is that you are nice to other people. If you think anyone else is being abusive, either in a forum or elsewhere in the site, please click the report abuse button, and we will take care of it.
No.
Whilst it would be nice, this kind of thing is far more appropriate for package holidays and flights. We have spoken to many small local travel businesses and have found they would rather have the opportunity to talk to you and answer all your questions. In reality, few of them have the time to maintain their availability in multiple web sites – they would be rather out serving their customers!
If you’ve just had a fantastic experience with a great tour or accommodation, and they are not on Tourdust, please tell us about them. It means other people will be able to find them too, and most importantly, you can help the business out by giving them a direct route to new customers around the world. Click on “add new experience”, provide as much details as you can, and let us know why you think they are so great. We’ll then check with them to make sure they are happy to feature.
If you know other people who love independent travel and prefer small out of the way places, please let them know about Tourdust.
If you are on the Tourdust Standard plan, then customers will click-through to your website. If you are on the Tourdust Commission plan they will make the initial contact with you through our message centre. From there you can either continue the conversation in the message centre (using our Paypal booking tool to receive deposits online, see how this works here), or you can simply divert the conversation to email or telephone according to your preferences.
In addition to promoting your products on Tourdust, we also offer you a page to talk about your business more generally, think of it as a shop front. When you visit your profile page, you will be able to add, edit or delete products and edit your profile and contact details. Your profile includes an about me section, your terms and conditions and your recommendations.
Once you have joined Tourdust as a seller, it is simple to add products. On your profile page, click “add product”. You will need to add photographs and descriptions of your product, so it helps to have them ready. We reckon it can take as little as 5 minutes to add a product, but why not grab a cup of tea, sit back and take your time. We also collect some other data to help travellers navigate and filter through products on the site. Full help is available within the form itself.
We show non-standard crops of photos on Tourdust because we think they look better. Luckily we have a nice and simple cropping mechanism, which gives you a choice of three crops of your photo. Every time we try it, we think it makes our photos look better, but then we’re not great photographers… If it doesn’t work for your photo, then you can always try a different one!
Because we cover a wide variety of products with different price structures, a little common sense is necessary in listing your price. Our rule of thumb for tours is to list the price per person for the tour. For accommodation, list the price per room per night.
We appreciate that many of our favourite tour providers pride themselves on tailoring their service to the customer. We do ask you to select a typical duration, and price, and suggest you just select the most popular duration (and price for that duration), you can then explain your flexibility in the product description.
We recommend you add your booking terms to your profile. This can be as simple as describing how you deal with cancellations etc., or can cover your full Ts and Cs.
Your first resort is to reply to the review publicly (you should see a reply to this review button next to the review). This would always be the best course of action if you feel the review is unfair, or there were mitigating circumstances. As a last resort you can report the review as abuse (click the report abuse button) and we will investigate the claim and remove / amend as appropriate.
We encourage travellers to add photos to Tourdust. If the photo is abuse, please report it and we will happily remove it.
On your edit profile page, you can select how you want Tourdust to contact you (or not!). You can choose to be notified if (1) there are updates or special offers from Tourdust, (2) you have new messages in your Tourdust inbox or (3) someone replies to your review or forum post or (4) someone reviews one of my products. Please be aware, we will always send you an email if you make a booking on Tourdust.
We record the number of clicks from Tourdust to your site, (being careful to not count repeat clicks). You are charged per click up to a maximum monthly amount. Any clicks we generate beyond that amount are not billed. This keeps it simple for you, and means costs won’t ever run away from you.
We charge you a percentage of bookings generated as a result of an enquiry through Tourdust. If you use the Tourdust system to take online payments via Paypal we will record these transactions automatically. If you don’t choose to use the system and pick up a booking either on the phone, by email or through your website having received the initial enquiry from us, we ask you to report the booking via a simple monthly form.
You will receive a monthly invoice by email. To pay the outstanding amount, follow the link in the email to make payment via credit / debit card online.
Tourdust is a community, and relies heavily on word of mouth recommendations from both travellers and people like you. If you like what we are doing on Tourdust, ask your customers to come and review their experience with you on Tourdust. We’ve also created a simple domain name extension so you can easily promote your pages on Tourdust to travellers (tourdust.com/“yourname”, you can set “yourname” in your profile pages).
You can also help build the community by recommending other tours or accommodation to feature on Tourdust. Once they’re on Tourdust, you can then recommend them on your profile page, which is great if they are complimentary services that your potential customers should also check out.
Please feel free to contribute to traveller forums, it’s a great way to promote yourself to prospective customers – just remember to be helpful and nice and not to try to sell to hard. We have also created several forums specifically for travel businesses, where you can chat with each other and share tips on sales, marketing, technology etc.
