This week saw the launch of TOURDUST, a community travel site for the long tail of travel, by founders and couple Anna Colclough and her husband. Because of their pitch during the Female Internet Heroes event, they decided to speed-up the launching of their website, albeit in beta-status. In her 3-minute pitch yesterday before a packed room of 100 interested entrepreneurs and investors, she started off by telling the vision of her business and what they are trying to achieve. Amazing and authentic, grass-roots, independent, off the beaten track travel experiences are to be found on the site, like one-man-organized- Iberian ham tours in Andalucia, Spain.

Anna explained clearly in her pitch of 3 minutes the benefits for the niche tour operators who feature on her site, which is mainly a shop front based upon personality, the possibility to collaborate with other small tour operators and to deal directly with travellers. The benefit for the users of the site will be ability to find unique experiences, not to be found easily through Google. A modern, smooth design, the possibility to read user generated content and a unique booking system, must also give the edge over the many travel sites in this competitive market.

The business model is based upon transaction fees for sales through the site, advertising revenue from feature slots and premium listings.

The coming period, Anna -who used to work for Unilever- will recruit tour operators up to the site. At the pitch she also raised a theme -very familiar to most startups-, being  the question 'whether to prioritising depth of content or smoothness of technology?'