Fernando Bigeriego and Sara Molina Valor, IM students
Posted: Sat Dec 07, 2024 9:38 am
Fernando Bigeriego and Sara Molina are the founders of Ruralzoom, a rural and active tourism search engine that has 3,830 rural accommodations, 624 activities and 124 restaurants. The portal is currently undergoing a complete renovation, so both are using part of the knowledge acquired in their respective courses: Postgraduate in Search Engine Marketing and Web Analytics. Online (Fernando) and Higher Technical Course in Social Media Strategist. Online (Sara) to attract the maximum number of users and convert them into followers of Ruralzoom. They tell us how they achieve this in the following interview.
What is your professional background?
Our knowledge is focused on the tourism sector, business administration and switzerland phone number list management, marketing, customer service, accompanied by a good dose of professional experience of all kinds, especially in the last 8 years.
How did the idea of creating Ruralzoom come about?
In 2009, when www.ruralzoom.com was first established , from our point of view as travellers there were many shortcomings in the tourism sector, specifically in the rural tourism sector . Therefore, we, regular and enthusiastic consumers of this sector, created the portal that for the first time would bring together all the existing advantages plus many others of our own creation, both for travellers and owners, where we were pioneers in several aspects. The most representative was the first application of geolocation , hence the name, since at that time practically no portal had the so-called "map results" .
We were also the first to unify both accommodations and activities and restaurants in a single portal . The last aspect to highlight is an equitable system for all owners of tourist businesses , very economical and without preferential promotion injustices.
What difficulties did you encounter when undertaking this project? How has it evolved and where are you now?
We have been through all kinds of situations that one doesn’t think about when starting a new business. At the time, they were tough (some tougher than others). But today, looking back, we are “almost glad” that we went through them, because they have prepared us for practically any situation and now we face them with absolute normality and they are solved in the same way.
Among them, in a generic way, we have suffered technical problems, human problems, boycotts by the competition, changes of partners, plagiarism, unsuccessful hacking attempts and extortion … and a long etcetera, in addition of course to arriving as a new company in a complex sector such as tourism, where nobody knew us at our origins… we could practically be attributed with the expression “scared to death” .
Today, those who were competitors are allies, we have an optimized and consolidated human team and client structure , we have a platform that works very well to which we are applying constant updates (at this moment we are carrying out the most important update in our history where, in addition to a new and necessary responsive appearance , we applied many new functionalities that we always wanted to have and now, after several years, we have managed to implement them at the best time).
What is your professional background?
Our knowledge is focused on the tourism sector, business administration and switzerland phone number list management, marketing, customer service, accompanied by a good dose of professional experience of all kinds, especially in the last 8 years.
How did the idea of creating Ruralzoom come about?
In 2009, when www.ruralzoom.com was first established , from our point of view as travellers there were many shortcomings in the tourism sector, specifically in the rural tourism sector . Therefore, we, regular and enthusiastic consumers of this sector, created the portal that for the first time would bring together all the existing advantages plus many others of our own creation, both for travellers and owners, where we were pioneers in several aspects. The most representative was the first application of geolocation , hence the name, since at that time practically no portal had the so-called "map results" .
We were also the first to unify both accommodations and activities and restaurants in a single portal . The last aspect to highlight is an equitable system for all owners of tourist businesses , very economical and without preferential promotion injustices.
What difficulties did you encounter when undertaking this project? How has it evolved and where are you now?
We have been through all kinds of situations that one doesn’t think about when starting a new business. At the time, they were tough (some tougher than others). But today, looking back, we are “almost glad” that we went through them, because they have prepared us for practically any situation and now we face them with absolute normality and they are solved in the same way.
Among them, in a generic way, we have suffered technical problems, human problems, boycotts by the competition, changes of partners, plagiarism, unsuccessful hacking attempts and extortion … and a long etcetera, in addition of course to arriving as a new company in a complex sector such as tourism, where nobody knew us at our origins… we could practically be attributed with the expression “scared to death” .
Today, those who were competitors are allies, we have an optimized and consolidated human team and client structure , we have a platform that works very well to which we are applying constant updates (at this moment we are carrying out the most important update in our history where, in addition to a new and necessary responsive appearance , we applied many new functionalities that we always wanted to have and now, after several years, we have managed to implement them at the best time).