1000 Mile Journeys Helps Push Your Limits

Peter Syme, founder of 1000 Mile Journeys, helps inspire travelers to dream more, learn more and do more. Created for ordinary people who want to achieve extraordinary challenges.

With the emphasis on the doing! Think of Toughmudder but one that lasts 50-100 days!

Peter is a part of our Edinburgh Travel Massive chapter and has agreed to answer a few of our questions to help inspire Travel Massive members to dream more, learn more and do more!

What inspired you to create 1000 Mile Journeys? 

I was inspired to create 1000 Mile Journeys because I believe and know people are capable of way more than they think they are. The gap we fill in the adventure travel world is the gap between adventure holidays and high end technical skill based expeditions. We take people on long physical and mentally challenging journeys on foot and by bike that require no high end technical skills but do demand endurance and toughness.

We hope to inspire a generation about the importance of health and well being via the stories of our expeditions.

How did you build the company? 

We had the advantage of working for over 10 years via our other adventure travel companies, which enabled us to understand the desires of adventure travellers and ordinary people.

What makes 1000 Mile Journeys different from other companies out there? 

We do not see any other adventure travel or expedition company doing the type and style of expeditions we are doing. Each are bespoke and unique, often not repeated. This combined with our focus on “ordinary people doing extraordinary challenges”. We launched by doing a couple of test expeditions to see if our concept was correct and it indeed was feasible. From then on it has been down to the power of word of mouth via social sites like Facebook.

On average we get about 1,000 people expressing interest in each of our expeditions. We take 8-16 people on them!

How is your startup changing the future of the industry or helping to make travel better?

We hope to inspire those people to travel in remote challenging locations in a way that mentally and physically challenges them, hugely improves their fitness and confidence and exposes them to unique cultures during the journeys. By doing so we know people go back to their lives as much more motivated and confident people. In fact most of our team members to date have made life changing decisions after returning from our expeditions.

Do you have any tips for new entrepreneurs who want to create a successful startup?

Focus on people and their desires. It is easy today to focus on technology and social media, etc. but in the end if you want to make a difference in people’s lives you have to focus on the people.

Travel Start-Up is a monthly series that profiles unique online travel start-ups in the Travel Massive community around the world. You can connect with Peter and 1000 Mile Journeys on Travel Massive, Facebook and Twitter.