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Excerpt from the Trip Info Pack
“Siberia has blazing hot summers. Average July to August temperatures are 26-38°C (79-100°F). Forest fires are a serious problem, but the winters are, indeed, viciously cold. Siberia is the coldest place on Earth – even colder than the poles, because of the elevation and distance from the ocean. In the extreme north amongst the Chukchi peoples, extreme winter lows of -62°C have been recorded. Even in settled areas served by rail transport like Syktyvkar (site of one of Siberia’s most notorious prison camps) -52°C was recorded in 2001 in the city centre. Police cars patrolled the streets, broadcasting warnings for people to stay at home and not try to go to work or school. Russian scientists have estimated that the human body is not capable of noticing differences in temperature lower than approx -35°C. But the temperature can fall nearly 20 degrees lower than this, and cases of frostbite in people who venture out in -55°C, not knowing how cold it is, are regrettably common. After an hour at such temperatures, your fingers or ears can snap off if accidentally hit, even lightly. If you do not lose them in this way, amputation may still be needed to save an arm or a leg. Never underestimate the Siberian winter”.
Zhoosh
Neil is giving me the low-down on the front end of the trip process. What’s he pitching, and who to? Where’s he positioned in the market place?
“We used to be ‘mid’ and now we’re probably ‘mid-to-up’. We haven’t dropped any of the ‘mid’ element but we’ve got several zhooshed-up versions of our trips, which are available mainly because people ask for them. Almost everything we do has usually arisen from somebody coming to us and asking if we can do it… and we’ve said yes! Whenever we do something like this, we always have an eye to introducing it as a standard thing for future clients as well.
“It’s not just about different destinations. For example, someone says, ‘Could we buy up the entire four-berth compartment, just for the two of us?’ And we say, ‘Why not? It’s going to cost you a bit, but if you don’t mind paying, of course!’ And then we decide to put this as an option in the brochure, and a very large number of people choose to pay for it. It’s in ways like this that we’ve gone from being mid to up. Another thing we introduced was upgrades in hotels. Very often we’re offering the best, or the only hotel that is available in a place anyway, but we offer an upgrade to a business-class room or a suite.”
So this expansion into “up” territory came from customer demand then?
“Very much so. Almost solely. It was entirely customer lead.”
Are you surprised at some of the things people have been willing to pay for?
“To a certain extent. Personally, as a traveller who’s experienced these things, I would think ‘I wouldn’t pay all that, the difference doesn’t seem worth the money.’ But everybody has different priorities. We’re not here to force our personal priorities on anybody else. Within the company we have some very different people. Odette (our marketing manager) and I have completely different travel priorities. She’d rather go for the hotel that has the beauty salon included, whereas I’d go for the log cabin at the end of a very long path, because you can see the squirrels from there! We’ve tried to cover as many of the bases as our destinations permit.”
The Russian quest for mixer taps. There will come a point in your relationship with a Russian visiting the West where they pull you aside to have a quiet word. Without wanting to appear rude, they’ll really want to know why there are no (or few) mixer taps ‘over here’ – because after all, they don’t want to have to move their hands from left to right between the hot and cold water at the sink.
Buying The Dream
“Somebody tried to buy the company a couple of years ago. We had a mysterious but very formal offer. They wanted to completely change the company. Their actual words were: ‘We’d make it a 5-star company. We’d make it 7-star if we could!’ I ended up saying to them, ‘You’ll just be disappointed, because the very nature of some of the destinations we go to is that they are out in the middle of nowhere, and there just isn’t anything higher than 3-star in many of these locations. You’ll be frustrated’. And in the end the negotiations fell to pieces. Whether we would have sold or not is an interesting question.
“In any case, they were put off as soon as they realised how unrealistic their ideas had been about what would be possible in some of these destinations. They were rather dismissive towards what was actually there, I thought, because 3 star doesn’t necessarily have to be cheap and nasty. It can actually be better than 5-star, because you get something that is more authentic, or better located in terms of being out of the way, on a back road. There’s a basic incompatibility between exclusive 5-star travel and places like Siberia or Mongolia. Mongolia isn’t the poorest nation in the world, but people there aren’t wealthy by any means. If you went on a 5-star trip through Mongolia, you’d be missing everything the country has to offer. You’d just be seeing a kind of fake Mongolia that had been set up for tourists.”
Through the window of a nice hotel room that could really be anywhere?
“Exactly. In fact there are hotels like that in Ulan Bator, but we try not to use them. They do have their place, I’m not taking a morally disapproving tone here. If you’re going there as a representative of a world bank or on some business trip, you have every right to a nice hotel if your company’s prepared to pay for it. But by staying in that hotel, you won’t see anything unique to Mongolia.”
The Poolside Traveller
We discuss the curious phenomenon of people who travel abroad, just to sit by the hotel pool reading a book – curious to me in any case. What’s the point? Neil is more understanding.
“I’ve done that kind of holiday too. We’re not here to give people black marks for not doing what we want them to do! Where the option exists to do that, we offer it. If you go to Lake Baikal, for example, you don’t have to go tracking through the woods, looking for lynxes. You can just sit by the side of the lake with a nice cold beer in your hand. Or you can go on a boat trip and wear a Captain’s hat if that’s what you want! That’s fine too. Russians do it when they go to Lake Baikal, so why shouldn’t foreigners? We don’t disapprove of activities like that. It’s more the case that very often those kind of things aren’t available in every destination. Lake Baikal isn’t really a representative example, because in most of our other destinations you wouldn’t be able to find options like that.”
The “point”, then, to return to my earlier question, could be to…
“…just get away from the British weather, or because the beer’s cheap, or there’s unrestricted casino gambling. There’s still an element of ‘abroad’ about it. But I can understand your reaction. I wouldn’t feel motivated to go abroad for that!”
As long as they’re happy, though: that’s what matters!
Next time: Tips and Tales (Part 3)
Signing Up: booking conditions, things to bring with you. Also, Obvious and Yet Not: visas, sun cream…
[Photos by ekzotikto and Garr1971]
