Are you looking for an adventure in the vast terrains of Oman? OmanTripper is one of the most popular local social media initiatives in Oman and we sat down with the three young Omani founders to hear more about this portal that promotes tourism in the country.
What is OmanTripper?
OmanTripper is an initiative aimed at showcasing the many beautiful and wonderful places worth exploring in Oman, we are mainly a blog but we are also active on most social media platforms. Our goal is to be the information portal for visitors to Oman!
Who is behind this innovative concept of OmanTripper?
There are three of us working on OmanTripper:
- Ali Mohammadi: an engineer and a couch potato on weekdays, but an adventure-explorer on weekends
- Riyadh Al Balushi: a lawyer and a self-proclaimed internet celebrity who likes to do stuff on the internet.
- Mohammed Juma: an engineer who has an ambition of changing the world, at least the one he lives in. Mohammed is a family man with lovely wife and three girls, but he still manages to make time for exploring Oman during the weekends.
How and when did you get the inspiration for OmanTripper?
I had been back to Oman after living overseas for a number of years, and I had started going on trips with my good friend Riyadh. The more places we explored, the more we realized how little information is available about them, whether they were in Muscat or out on the mountains or wadis! We thought ‘how hard can it be to have a website providing information about these places with location directions?’ So that’s how the idea started and by January 2013 we had started OmanTripper!
Who is your target audience for OmanTripper?
Anyone who is looking for places to visit in Oman, be it visitors or residents!
How does the process for OmanTripper work?
We visit places, we take photos, we write about them. Sometimes we plan our trips weeks in advance and other times it’s a spur of the moment thing when we hear of an attraction we haven’t seen yet. We try to fit in a trip every weekend, except for the hot summer months of course!
What has the response been so far to it?
We have been getting really good response from comments on our blog and on social media, which is very encouraging and inspires us to continue our work! We have also written a number of travel articles in a local newspaper which received positive response.
What are your future plans for OmanTripper?
We are exploring a number of things for the future. The immediate plans is to continue visiting new destinations and writing about them on our blog. We are also planning on creating short video-clips highlighting our trips. In addition, due to the many requests we have been receiving, we have plans to offer guided tours to specific destinations in Oman.
For more information, visit www.omantripper.com
