My second exploration of this is year Bike Experience, which we named it later on as Journeys of Change. The goal of this seven weeks long project is to turn this idea of running a bike tour into a successful business. Moreover, the bike route will contain the theme of change that occurs in Cambodia as it mentioned in our business name, Journeys of Change. Mission: Our mission is to share insights into the lives of everyday Cambodians by creating a tour for visitors and locals, of the Phnom Penh area. The tour will focus on explaining the changes that have occurred and are occurring in this country, while simultaneously supporting local businesses, being environmentally conscious, training tour guides in responsible tourism, providing cross-cultural exchanges, and creating job opportunities for Liger students to help further and fund their education, after high school.
In order to start this business, our team has divided into three smaller teams that were working on a different part of this business. For me, I was working as a business plan member, that focused on writing the report about the whole idea about this business and to keep it organized. Also, I’ve been working on calculating the expense and decide how much I charge our client per tour and how can we the money. Most importantly, my team had created a lot of forms and documents such as liability waiver, feedback system, and three job descriptions (tour guide, office director, and marketing manager).
Another team was the tour guides, which they were focusing on the stops for our bike route as well as design training course for the additional 20 tour guides. Moreover, after the finished finalizing the stops, they will need to write the script for each stop in order to make it easy for the trainee guides to summarize.
Our last team was marketing. In this team, they were trying to use many ways to advertise our bike tours. At the end our exploration, they had created a website and a Facebook page. Additionally, they were trying to partner with some of the hotels by the riverside of Phnom Penh, which is close by our starting point for our bike tour.
Since we were trying to turn this project into a real business, we had hired our office director and marketing manager to keep track of our progress. Also, all of the students that involved in this exploration will be our official tour guides and we will have 20 more tour guides coming soon.
Our first tour with finalized stops.
Battambang trip: At the start of this exploration, we’ve been to Battambang for our one week trip. During this trip, we got to learn from one bike tour company, Soksabike who is our mentor. We learned almost everything about their business which gave us so many ideas of our how our bike experience should be.
