TotallyBarbados.com wins World Travel Award

A three-year-old Barbados company has won the 2008 World Travel Awards accolade for the Caribbean's Leading Travel Information Website. The announcement that TotallyBarbados.com copped the award for the second year in a row was made last Tuesday (November 11th, 2008) at the annual World Travel Market in London, England which features over 5,000 exhibitors from 200 countries.

TotallyBarbados.com beat out travel websites from Jamaica, Antigua-Barbuda, St. Kitts-Nevis, Aruba, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

TotallyBarbados.com features more than 3,000 pages of information on the island and uses search engine optimization to improve the odds of swiftly finding the articles, events and other listings on the site.

Brett Callaghan, owner and Managing Director of TotallyBarbados.com, who was in London for the 2008 World Travel Market, was elated at winning again: "It's amazing to win for the second year in a row," he said after the announcement at the ExCel centre in London, in the presence of officials from the Barbados Tourism Authority (BTA).

Callaghan, 34, is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) and lived in Canada for 12 years before returning to Barbados to set up the company in 2005.

"I think it's because we are very informative and the most up-to-date; and TotallyBarbados.com is one of only five per cent of websites that conform to World Wide Web design standards," he added.

Callaghan thanked all who voted for Totally Barbados, including the nearly 100 commercial premium supporters of the TotallyBarbados.com website, in particular the retail jewellery chain Diamonds International, which has been a "platinum supporter" since the website's inception in 2005.

The 2008 award for the Caribbean's Leading Travel Information Website was voted on by over 160,000 travel professionals and organizations from more than 160 countries.

The World Travel Awards were initiated in 1993 to celebrate professional excellence in the world's travel and tourism industry. Travel professionals and discerning travellers have come to regard the World Travel Awards as the very best endorsement that a travel product could hope to receive.