East Coast school pals turned Holiday Gurus
Two best friends from St Mary’s school in Drogheda are taking the travel world by storm with their blog Holidayguru.ie, which has over six million fans on facebook and 500,000 unique monthly users.
Now based in Dortmund, Germany, Shane Clarke from Laytown and Martin McKenna from Julianstown have built up the site since its inception in 2014, and recently merged with the UK version to double its size.
“We’re not travel agents, but what we do is offer people the best possible deals in flights, hotels or vacations, as well as information like climate and culture, all in one spot,” explains Shane (25), whose parents Jackie and Martin still live in the coastal village.
“It is all based our experience and expertise and we try to get of Europe as a much as possible, to give a more international service.”
Shane went to school in Scoil An Spioraid Naoimh, Laytown and then St Mary’s in Drogheda, where he met his future work colleague Martin, whose parents Martin and Rosaleen also live in Julianstown.
“We’ve been friends for about 15 years and even got our first taste of working together in the tourist industry in Funtasia for the summer,” he says with a laugh.
“That job was a golden ticket when you were a teenager, and you really learned what families want out of their leisure time.”
Shane completed a Masters in Marketing in 2017 and joined his friend Martin in HolidayGuru in 2017.
“We have an Irish spin on a German company, and I’m getting used to life in Germany gradually,” he says. “I’ve only be learning the language for a year, but we are a very international company, and everyone speaks English, so it’s hard to get practice!”
For the past year, the team have developed the Gurucast, a podcast where they look at the travel industry and speak to influencers, photographers, artists, musicians and anyone with an involvement in travel! The guys are now hoping to have the podcast nominated at the Podcast Awards 2018, an international competition. It was an idea that hadn’t been done in the company up until we did it, and we’ve interviewed a couple of really interesting people in it like Evanna Lynch, travel blogger Louis Cole and the Delorentos,” he explains.
“Between myself, Martin and another girl called Ella Carroll we produced it pretty much ourselves and we also made a couple of videos to go along with it that are on Facebook. If people want to listen to it they can check it out on iTunes, Spotify or wherever they get can get podcasts.”
You can find the video they produced about the podcast awards here: https://business.facebook.com/ Holidayguru.IE/videos/1095785800570624/ or find them on www.holidayguru.ie.