A new barter website, tourboarding.com, is using a direct barter method to hook up travelers that speak different languages with people in places like China to help them perfect their language skills.
From the press release:
Travelers who plan to visit China can use TourBoarding.com’s bilingual communication interface and travel barter platform to arrange a rich variety of travel benefits from local hosts, such as home stay, tour guiding, and Chinese language or cooking lessons. Instead of paying cash for any of these services, travelers can pay by speaking their native language to their hosts for two hours a day, to help them achieve proficiency in their desired language. English is the most in demand, but German, Japanese, and French are also highly sought by the Chinese.
“Unlike other sites that bring travelers and hosts together, TourBoarding is the first site of its kind to offer a structured framework for travelers and hosts to barter directly with one another for services and make specific arrangements according to their own needs,” explained co-founder Ken Chen. The framework is also designed to be flexible enough so that travelers can deviate from the framework and self-design an à la carte travel experience according to their individual tastes and preferences. TourBoarding facilitates the searching, communication, and arranging process, but leaves the final details to hosts and travelers who are responsible for making any actual exchange happen.
TourBoarding is also the first site to offer traveler and host exchanges that are grounded on the principle of reciprocity: both traveler and host give and receive a valuable benefit in the exchange. Both have an equally vested interest in ensuring the success of the exchange. To date, many TourBoarding exchanges have been completed with positive testimonials posted on the site, demonstrating that TourBoarding’s travel barter model is sound and viable.
More at: http://bignews.biz/?id=924149
