5 reasons adventure sports fans love Egypt

Mark Pawlak    Adventure Sports & Travel Thoughts, ash, kiteboardingholidays, Kitesurfing Travel Talk, New Site Features on ASH, snowkitingholidays     Adventure Sports, extreme sports, kitesurfers, multi-activity-holidays, watersports

Unrest in Egypt remains top of the news agenda, still it’s a country favoured by the extreme sports and adventure sports community, and as soon as the political temperature falls, they’ll be back.

Here’s why:

It’s great for kitesurfers. Sea temperatures rarely fall below 18C, conditions remain excellent for all standards, and destinations are really well developed.

Kitesurfing on Egypt's flat waters

It’s a scuba fans dream. While all we are seeing above the surface is drama, under the water Egypt has some of the best dive spots in the world. As well as a collection of reefs, there are submarine canyons and the submerged wreck of the SS Thistlegorm to discover.

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Site re-launch keeps AdventureSportsHolidays.com on top

Mark Pawlak    Adventure Sports & Travel Thoughts, ash, New Site Features on ASH     Adventure Sports, Adventure Travel, Overlanding, Travel, Travel News

Adventure Sports Holidays (ASH) has re-launched its network of 18 sites. By improving their look, feel, and functionality while integrating the latest social media, the company is guaranteeing a better experience for the sites’ 140,000+ monthly visitors. Having dedicated individual activity sites is key to the success as these provide visitors with a site dedicated to their interests.

Despite the economic downturn and difficulties experienced by the travel industry, the Hove-based travel portal has seen a 12% growth in traffic, a 29% growth in enquiries and a 31% increase in bookings. Most of the growth is attributed to great SEO, with the network of sites appearing top of google for 100’s of high-traffic keywords.

ASH works with around 400 suppliers worldwide, promoting their holidays, courses, day trips and accommodation to the growing number of people looking for active holidays. It works with both small and large companies, providing exposure to customers that would otherwise be difficult to reach.

Recently interviewed by BBC Essex and featured in TravelMole, Managing Director Luke Rees explained that customers are increasingly interested in booking ‘activity-based’ holidays and that ASH provides them with the widest choice on the internet.

“The new look sites are a lot faster, are easier to use, and help potential customers easily get in touch with companies that provide what they are looking for,” Luke added.

Kitesurfing, Multi-Activity, Snowboarding, Surfing, Scuba Diving, Windsurfing and Skiing holidays have seen at least a 50% increase in bookings in the last 12 months. ASH dedicates a website to each of these sports, as well as to Trekking, Mountainbiking, Rafting, Kayaking, Paragliding, Skydiving, Overlanding, Snow Kiting, Wakeboarding and Rock Climbing.

“We’ve pulled out all the stops to make our sites easy to use and full of useful information and of course great trips,” Luke continued, “and we are getting fantastic feedback from people using the re-launched sites! We have other single activity sites soon to be launched as customer feedback has been very positive as people love to use a website dedicated to their chosen activity.”

ASH offers over 6000 adventures, serves more than 15,000 locations in over 200 countries offering over 80 different activities.

The new site is visible here: http://www.adventuresportsholidays.com/

View all 18 of the sites here: http://www.adventuresportsholidays.com/about/sites.php

travel-copywriting.com – new adventure travel copywriting service launches

Tim B    New Site Features on ASH     blogs, content, copy writing, copywriting, SEO, social media, Travel News

Not strictly a new feature on ASH but a new venture for our team. Last Friday we launched our adventure travel & sports copywrting business – aptly named travel-copywriting.com. Owning and running a web portal in the adventure travel sector with over 1 million unique visitors a year, we recognise the value of having quality, well written content.

With the explosion of social media, many online businesses have looked to create their own communities to source ‘user generated’ content from. Whilst this can help to give new site visitors first hand knowledge of a particular holiday or destination, the quality of this form of copy is often left wanting. At ASH we have recognised that our customers still value quality, well-researched and professionally-written editorial content. read more

Share your Adventures on Facebook!

Tim B    New Site Features on ASH    

Join us on Facebook

Login with Facebook
ASH is now set up so that you can login easily and quickly to the site with your Facebook account.  The first time you do this you will be asked for an email on our site to either create a new account or (if you type your ASH account email) connect your Facebook account to your existing ASH account. To login or create an account just click on the facebook icon at the top right of any page. Then everytime you login after that it just takes a few seconds.  Very easy indeed!

Bookmark & Share
You can also now share any content you upload on ASH with your friends on Facebook.  just click on the little ‘Share’ icon whenever you see it.  Infact you can just share pages you like or holidays you have seen by bookmarking the page.  On all product pages there is a ‘Be Social’ section on the left.

Join our Facebook Fan Page
If you are not already a member we also now have a Facebook Fan page with just under 1000 fans (we prefer to call them friends).  You can join up and view all the latest content here:  www.facebook.com/adventuresportsholidays. Our Fan page is connected up to our Twitter page so if you would prefer to follow us on Twitter then visit twitter.com/advensportshol. If you follow us we’ll follow you!

Reviews for Adventure Sports Destinations

Tim B    New Site Features on ASH    

Read & Write Adventure Sports Reviews & Ratings

We have just launched our location / activity reviews and ratings in our tribe (community) area! You can now tell us what you did and where and add your rating and a short review.  Each location has an overall rating shown as a percentage  for that specific sport / activity in that specific location. You can then read each tribe member’s review and view the individual ratings.

We will shortly be adding a ‘month of travel’ to this feature so that next time you are planning your adventure sports trip you can check out the reviews for that particular time of year and see what people who have been there have to say.

We’re excited about this new feature,  as adventure sports travellers ourselves it’s often hard to find information on the best time to go and what it’s really like. We’ve been madly adding all the places we’ve been and what we thought about them.  You can already upload videos and photos from your trip all of which get displayed on your public profile page. You have to join our tribe before you can add your own ratings and reviews.

To check out how it all works and read some of our reviews – take a look at one of my favourite places to kitesurf and read my review for kitesurfing in Essaouira, Morocco.  You have to scroll down to the ‘Our Tribe’ section and click on the ‘Reviews’ tab.

Join Our Tribe

Tim B    New Site Features on ASH    

The new tribe (community) section is now live. You can join the tribe by creating an account on our site or signing in through a number of popular social media accounts including Facebook, Google Account, Windows Live, Yahoo etc. Once you are logged in you get a public profile page (like this one) and you can also upload content on any page. Basically go to the most relevant location / activity page scroll down to the Our Tribe section and add your content. At the moment this includes photo albums, videos, news and events, asking questions and posting tips. Very soon you will be able to rate and review activities in certain locations. eg If you have been kitesurfing in Cumbuco Brazil then let everyone know what it was like and give it a 5 star rating.

If you haven’t already join our tribe and share your next adventure!

We’re still ironing out a few bugs so if you find any problems please let us know by using the feedback form on the right handside of the website.

Live Weather Reports

Tim B    New Site Features on ASH    

We pleased to announce that we have set up a special partnership with Wind Guru to use their weather data & reports for a massive range of locations on ASH. The detailed 5 day weather reports include wind speed and direction, wave heights, wave period & direction. Not to mention temperature, cloud cover and rain. We are currently have reports for around 300 locations and this will double in the coming weeks.

To view the reports go to any location page and click on the ‘View Weather Forecast’ link and it will open in a lightbox. Take a look at our Tarifa page to see it in action!