G Adventures & Travel Blogger Gary Arndt Announce Exclusive Travel Photography Tour

Departing May 5, 2012 the Great Wide Everywhere trip will explore a number of spectacular national parks and natural wonders around the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas, offering 11 travellers a unique opportunity to travel, learn and build their photography skills alongside Gary who is one of the world’s most influential travel bloggers and one of G Adventures’ Wanderers in Residence.

Throughout the 15-day adventure ($2299 USD), travellers will receive hands-on training and participate in a number of guided shoots, covering a wide variety of topics and techniques. Daily review sessions will also create opportunities to learn more about the craft of photo editing.

Tour highlights include an evening photo walk of Las Vegas’ infamous strip and visits to the Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Park. In San Francisco, travellers will have the chance to photograph the Golden Gate Bridge and Muir Woods National Monument. The minibus is equipped with wi-fi so while they are on the road between sites there’ll be plenty of time to edit photos and post them to the web.

Gary says:

It’s an idea that’s been in gestation for some time, but G Adventures have been ramping up their social media activities recently and they’ve just launched their North America tours program (for 2012), so when I talked to them about it they suggested this route.

I went to most of the places on the route on a road trip two years ago and I know that at some of them… well, you could just throw your camera in the air and it would still take a great picture!

Andrew Hickey, G Adventures’ Marketing – Social Media Manager, says:

This is a first for G Adventures and we’re thrilled to be featuring Gary, who is one of the top travel bloggers on the planet and a Wanderers in Residence member. Since Wanderers in Residence is more than just a ‘free trip program’ to us, we felt it necessary to let these influential personalities eventually be featured on their own tours. While this itinerary was not designed by Gary, it is a tour he personally chose amongst all the North America tours we will begin offering for the first time this spring.

How does the deal work?

Andrew confirms that Gary has been offered a percentage for each customer who books the tour via his website. In addition, G Adventures are allowing Gary to run a contest on his website that will enable him to build traffic and reward one of his visitors with a free place on the tour. (The competition will run for 2 weeks from 2 Jan.)

For G Adventures and for Gary this first tour collaboration is a trial run. If it works as they hope, Andrew says there could be more co-branded tours with bloggers.

We have easily the top tier travel bloggers on our team and each could offer plenty to G Adventures in the way of a unique tour down the line. While we love the entire blogger community, we would probably want to work with WIR at first and then branch out to others if it makes sense for both parties.

If you are a travel blogger, would you be keen to create a co-hosted tour? 

Image: Gary Arndt