Talk:Gapyear.com

gapyear.com - Personal Knowledge

Hi everyone,

I thought I'd add a brief history here as I can see there isn't too much information left on the old company and it's a shame. It also seems the website was effected by Covid and so I hope it relaunches soon.

Gapyear.com was heavily responsible for pushing the name 'gap year' as the internationally used industry name that it is today. I created the company, with Tom, and so it might be seen as biased viewpoint, however, I haven't checked these pages in a decade and I'm unsure why they were altered to poorly represent the work we did. Lots of information has been removed from both the gapyear.com and the gap year history sections. I'll leave it up to you to decide what to put in, however, I can see that both Flight Centre (who ended up buying gapyear.com) and Raleigh International have taken the limelight for this and that is not a fair or accurate account of the events from back then. We did win a lot more awards than are listed here but I honestly don't remember them to list as facts. - What I have is from an old promotional document showing 'Won awards: The Times Top 10 Travel Websites 2002 to 2009, UK Travel Website of the Year 2008, Commission for Racial Equality Award, Australian Youth Travel Website of the Year 2007 and many more.'

Here's the history how I have it and I should be able to produce archived emails, published articles and even t-shirts to prove these facts if necessary.

Company Formation

Tom Griffiths wrote his book, Before You Go in 1997 after his first round the world trip and hitchhiking across Canada. The forward was written by Michael Palin and his charisma impressed Michael's agent, Anne, who adopted the young Tom, taking him on as her client with Michael's approval. Peter Pedrick started as an IT consultant in London performing roles for Continental Tyres, The US Navy, Pirelli Tyres, Guinness Breweries & the British Rubber Manufacturers Association. He notably created the first market share database of all vehicle tyres in the UK.

Both Peter & Tom were big travellers at the time and were introduced by a mutual friend in early 1998. When they met they instantly understood each other. After several hours, they were so engrossed in the conversation they left the coffee shop in Tottenham Court Road without paying the bill (they went back later). We proposed to call the company 'The Gap Year Company' because there were two major volunteering companies in the market using the name 'gap year'. We quickly agreed as year out, year off, elective, sabbatical, overseas experience and similar names were too generic and it was the 'gap' or 'life break' that should be the focus of the company name.

Tom was a great public speaker and author and Peter was a talented IT developer. Together they published and launched thegapyear.co.uk in early 1998 (I still have the t-shirts somewhere although this quickly changed to gapyear.com by 2000). Tom promoted the project over radio interviews and newspaper articles and Peter ensured it had a growing online presence via the search engines at the time. The purpose was to centralise the promotion of international volunteering opportunities and to offer independent travel advice for backpackers all under one roof. The The Gap Year Company Ltd was officially established on 13th July 1998.

The 1990s & early 2000s Gap Year Industry

After nearly 30 years of the internet, it's easy to forget the difficulty of access to information in the 1900s and pre-1998 there was not a lot of decent travel information for young people on a budget to see the world or to volunteer in foreign countries. There was also a misconception by employers and universities that travelling the world, by young people, was something that slackers and lazy people did, not understanding the level of preparation and effort involved. It was often perceived that, if you really had to travel at a young age, a volunteering project was by far the more fulfilling and character building thing to do no matter what it was.

Of course, there were already many great travel books for countries such as Lonely Planet & Trailblazer, however, that meant you had to buy a book per country and that got expensive if you wanted to spend a year or so travelling to 10-20 countries. There was also little advice (potentially none) on how to plan a round the world trip, buy the ticket, what to pack, budgeting, hostel experiences and generally an understanding of how you explained to your university or employer that what you were doing was a positive thing.

The volunteering companies at the time heavily promoted themselves only to the schools in their region and whatever they offered tended to be the only opportunities you could find. It meant that the larger charities and companies, who could afford to promote to more schools, were growing in dominance but were not necessarily offering the projects people wanted or even the projects that the people within those countries wanted to be offered. There was also a preconceived idea that a charity was better than a company offering a similar experience and so many schools promoted charities without much oversight or understanding of the work being performed on-the-ground.

The Website

The first iteration of the website was purely travel information. Essentially, representing large amounts of Tom's book and much more. In 1998 we were also commissioned by Virgin Books to create The Virgin Travellers Handbook and so much of the research budget was used for the book and the online site. One of the next tasks was to find volunteering projects, charities and companies and list their projects online so people could get a clear view of their opportunities.

By 2005, the company website grew to over 100,000 pages of hand-written website content and as part of our online site we also operated forums and chat groups. The chat and forums grew considerably and was one of the main drivers for the huge growth of the company over that time. We incorporated profiles and travel histories and promoted the community to support each other online, setup in-person events and meet up while travelling. This is one of the reasons we are considered to be one of the first niche social media networks on the internet as we had active community members in the hundreds of thousands from many countries and travelling to almost every country of the world. There were a few competing website from about 2003 onwards (for example the gap-year guidebook went online) but nothing was anywhere near the size and scale of the gapyear.com website.

The company made money through standard online advertising but mainly through the sales of 3rd party services through the website.

Media & Magazine

Gapyear.com became the international media spokespeople on Gap Years & Youth Development for TV, radio & newspapers. Tom was known as The Gap Year Guru and we reached millions of people across multiple countries each year.

TV, Radio, online articles and newspapers in the for of PR was used to by the specifically to promote information from the industry. The company didn't ever spend money on advertising. Indirectly it helped us, however, the vast majority of the work was to assist with industry disasters or to highlight statistics and pass on information. Tom appeared on many international TV shows and news channels as well as international radio stations, websites and newspapers. BBC News articles Independent News articles Guardian News articles Time Magazine HufPost

For several years, the company also distributed annual and bi-annual editions of The Gap Year Magazine with differing print run sizes, distributed to UK schools and universities. I have inforamtion showing a 300,000 print run and 1,000,000 readership from one of the edition. Lots of travel advice but most notably interviewing various stars and actors on the benefits of travel and volunteering, such as Jason Flemyng (Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels). Spring 2012 - Gap Year Magazine

Open Sourcing Gap Year

Around 1998-2001, there were two major volunteering companies using the term 'gap year' at the time. These companies were upset with each other and one tried to trademark the term to ensure their exclusive usage (I'm sure this is something they are not keen for anyone to know know!). Over that time, The Gap Year Company was quite pivotal in preventing this from happening and ensuring the term 'gap year' remained an open source name the entire industry could use and that no one could copyright it in the future. Other court cases occurred throughout the years and even The Gap Year Company was sued for using different versions of the name gap year. Ultimately, all cases failed and the term 'gap year' was defined as an open source industry name. (No references exist online of these court cases - all pre-2005)

Research & Industry Consultancy

In 1998, there was no information or official research on the industry, the mindsets, the reasons people too time off and even the how many people were doing it. One of the first things the company started to do was gather information on the people and the industry. Research and information was one of the most important things to us and Tom used it heavily in all of his radio and TV interviews and newspaper articles to ensure people were aware this was already a large industry and will only ever grow larger. Most importantly, to promote the benefits of taking a gap year, volunteering or travelling the world, and how it created a much more rounded and mature young person with a more stable student and graduate in the first few years after their travels.

The company spent a large amount of money and time learning about mindsets and motivations for travelling and researching the industry. We found that for many a gap year (or life break) occurred during transitions in their life stages. We also took a lot of time to understand the mental and life experience benefits travelling provided a person. It wasn't a guarantee to make them wealthy but it did mean they were likely to know a lot sooner in their life what they did and didn't like and gave them a better outlook on how they wanted to live their lives. The difficult act of saving money at a young age, when everyone was spending theirs, and taking the time to plan and prepare a world trip already demonstrates a level of maturity that employers should find important in young graduates.

The company produced information for large research companies, such as Mintel, and used this information to assist UK, Australian & US government officials as well as many journalists around the world.

Our consultancy placed GBP £150m into the UK 2007 budget with concept support in other countries. Unfortunately, the money was not utilised as it should have been. 2006 Youth Volunteering Fund Assisted Mintel to highlighted the gap year industry valuation of $11bn and was affecting half a generation of the first world. (Mintel Gap Year Report) Mintel Press Release

Financial Services

Money was a very important part of travelling over a sustained period and as well as offering many deals and promotions on hotels, travel, flights and projects gapyear.com also tried to make managing money and currencies a lot easier. They created a number of financial products but the most notable were: Assisting in the creation of the Gap Year Bank Account (Barclays & HSBC UK circa 2004) HSBC Gap Year Account Assisting in the creation of InsureandGo Gap Year Insurance (circa 2003) Insureandgo Gap Year Insurance Launched a Prepaid MasterCard with Advanced Payment Services (APS) in 2007 Gapyear.com & APS MasterCard

The company was sold to Flight Centre in 2010 as both Tom and Peter wanted to progress new opportunities after more than a decade in the industry. Gapyear.com sale to Flight Centre

Ppedrick (talk) 12:24, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

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There you go and I hope that helps. If anyone requires information on this or wishes me to edit the articles then please let me know. Ppedrick (talk) 12:19, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, but this is pretty useless without some reliable sources to back it up. Madeline (part of me) 12:24, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

No worries Madeline - I'll find the sources and update... thanks for the direct feedback! Ppedrick (talk) 12:25, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Regarding sources - I will highlight where possible, however, most of this information (as with the current gap year page and this gapyear.com page) is all also all hearsay (even if it's published by another company website). I would have thought that seeing as I founded the company it would be useful - otherwise this page, and by definition all other company pages, is pretty pointless. Ppedrick (talk) 12:29, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Do those links help validate the information? Ppedrick (talk) 14:45, 30 August 2022 (UTC)