In 1993, I moved to Thailand with my family to join SeaCanoe Thailand, based in Phuket. This was our promotion video. We had operations in Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam. Watch our Lao River Adventures where we made the first tourism exploration to the Kong Lor Cave here.
SeaCanoe was one of the original drivers of ecotourism in the 1990s, winning several major tourism awards.
It all got nasty with a shooting on the steps of the company’s office in 1998. Bird Nests, Caves, Guns and Corruption – the story of SeaCanoe, the Bird’s Nest concession holders, and Phang Nga Bay National Park read it here.
Phuket had a small community of foreigners in those days.
One of the fun things that I did was reading the English language news for Thai Channel 11.
I was also a part time guest lecturer at the Prince of Songkla University Faculty of Hospitality and Tourism at their Phuket campus.
In 1998, I set up a tourism consultancy working with local businesses and regional tourism authorities in the Mekong region.
We focused on travel destination websites in partnership with the public sector – the Visit Laos Years 1999 – 2000 here was made for the Lao Government. We then built visit-mekong.com for the National Tourism Authorities of Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia and Yunnan Province of China. We created the first tourism geomap of Cambodia (long before Google Maps) for their Ministry of Toruism and the Asia Development Bank.
My business was acquired by Asia Web Direct (phuket.com) and is now part of Expedia.
