Fun Travel Jobs

With new travel websites launching, it seems, every day, new ones have to do something dramatic in order to stand out. That’s what two year old travel site Jauntaroo is aiming for with a just launched job offer for a Chief World Explorer. Inspired by Tourism Queensland’s Best Job in the World campaign, in which an island caretaker is selected for a stint in the Great Barrier Reef (a campaign that generated 15 million worldwide page views and an estimated $18 million in publicity value) followed by Tourism Australia’s Six Best Jobs in the World, in which winners spend six months traveling around Australia, Jauntaroo is raising the ante with a job offer to send an intrepid traveler around the world for a year and pay him or her $100, 000. To earn it, the CWE must write for the site and appear in video webisodes about each destination. Not a tough deal.

Jauntaroo’s reason for this is obvious: to give exposure to the brand, a site that matches travelers to destinations by interest and budget as opposed to others that give travelers options for destinations they’ve already selected. Queensland’s campaign brought in 35, 000 entries from those millions of views. Jauntaroo, which had 10, 000 registered users before the campaign launched on Monday, is expecting a similar number of entries and millions more to take a look at the site. That’s the payback for their $100, 000 salary investment and split of the travel costs with the destinations which also expect to benefit from the publicity. Those destinations include Costa Navarino in Greece, the Maldives and Berlin so far and are projected to number 100 overall.

Apart from this wave of publicity, though, there is an altruistic angle to the search. The site is partnering with LiveDifferent Hero Holiday which creates programs to involve youths with humanitarian relief programs as well as other agencies to include a voluntourism aspect. “It’s a beautiful gift to see the world but it’ s also important to preserve that gift, “ says Tom Wilson, Jauntaroo’s Chief Commercial Officer. “To make sure that the culture and destinations and the environment are there for future generations. We want tourists to give back to the country.”