Looking back to move forward. Happy New Year everyone. This newsletter serves as the final newsletter for 2023. We will be looking at our accomplishments and lessons learned this year and what we plan to implement in the year ahead.

2023 was a year of significant organic social media growth. Between Facebook and Instagram we combined to grow our followers by well over 1,800 accounts and reached over 130,000. We are approaching nearly 1,000 followers on our LinkedIn as well. But of all the social media platforms that grew in 2023, it was TikTok that grew the most. Several of our videos received over 30,000 views. Our social media presence is important because it helps us to reach potential local experience providers, potential travelers and new brand ambassadors. Another reason our community grew so much in 2023 is because of two trips that we sponsored for local influencers and content creators, as well as our #TOPchefguide giveaway to close out the year. We might not have the largest amount of followers, but the quality of the followers who support us is immesurable. Our followers really support what we are doing and are proud to be a part of the community we’re forming.

On March 27, we officially launched the first version of our platform and since the launch, local providers have offered 66 unique experiences for travelers to purchase. Two providers hosted a traveler this year who mentioned to us that it was the best travel experience she had ever had. Many travelers both local and international have looked to us for guidance concerning helping them coordinate their vacations, and we’ve assisted them.

As mentioned in our previous newsletter, there were some significant challenges to deal with this year, but those challenges only helped us to grow and better assess the risks as we continue to expand this movement. As of now, I have visited 21 of the 22 regions in Madagascar and have gained even greater understanding of the potential experiences that could be provided. This year we gained even more of an understanding of the type of impact we can make. Local providers offering the same service on TourOnePlanet.com that they typically do within the traditional system increase their earnings by 4.5 times.

For all of the successes in 2023, we realize that there is so much we have to do in 2024 to go where we want to go. Thankfully, 2023 made that vision a lot more clear for us. Of course, we need to continue to organically grow our community both in person and on social media but there are two other projects that will be of our greatest focus this year. 

The first project is the development of our online platform. We will be investing in the development of its back-end functionality so that it can better serve both the traveler and the experience provider. We are also working on growing the number of people who come across our website through the search engine. While this will take a considerable upfront financial investment, we believe that longterm it will actually be a more affordable option and most importantly generate business for us and our community. This has been a project that we knew we would need to tackle at some point and we’re grateful for our local partner in Madagascar who is leading this project for us.

Our second project, which has mostly come to life in the last couple months is to create an independent local branch of TourOnePlanet in Madagascar. Upon completing our promotional #TOPchefguide experience, we realized that there would be so many experiences to be offered in Madagascar if the providers just were equipped with the simple technology and/or language capacity to access our platform. In lieu of that we believe that a local independent group whom we support could provide the pathway to bringing these experiences to our platform. If this project is successful, it could become one of our strategies that we employ when it comes time to expand into other destination markets.

We will be sure to provide more information on these projects within our upcoming newsletter’s, but for now we just want to thank you for supporting our dream of creating the access for local communities to determine the outcomes of tourism. 2023 was such an exciting year filled with challenges that provided the opportunities for us to grow. We look so forward to what is ahead of us in 2024!

Happy new year everyone, tratry ny taona daholo!

Tim McGuire
Founder, TourOnePlanet