About us
Formed from inspiration on a trip in early 2024 – Experts in Wow! was soft launched in 2025 and is now in development.
We are actively seeking and talking to outdoor experience providers – if this is you please contact us
For seekers of Wows
Find the known but also the unknown
The aim is to enable you to find exciting and interesting outdoor experiences and adventures – whether you know what you want or not…
If you know exactly where, when, what and who with you’ll be able to find it effectively and efficiently…
…but if you don’t know some or all of the above – you’ll also be able to locate a Wow!
We don’t always know what we want, we just know we want a great experience, often we are open to suggestion, or pure chance stumbling across something we haven’t heard of before (sometimes these new experiences are the best!). We will provide ways to improve inspiration and serendipity
Connect with like minded people for adventures
You know when you go on an organised activity, and you get on with many of the people on the course or event, you might stay in touch via a whatsapp group or something, and would be delighted to go on something with them in the future… …but it never quite happens. Well we are going to support ‘Tribes’ (looking for a better name to be honest). Groups of like minded individuals to go on adventures
For providers of Wows
Concentrate on what you do best
I bet most of you find your website and your social media a drag. Your website might be a bit out of date, cost and continues to cost a fortune, and is a pain to update – so you don’t…
One of our aims is to help you with all that – partly through service, partly through education and support (if you want it).
We will provide you with a web presence on our site – where you can market all your services (see later), but we will also support you with your own site and support you to create a fantastic looking and functioning site cheaply (using customisable templates), show you where to host it cheaply (we pay less than £5 per month to host this for example), and show you how to update it simply and effectively. We already do this informally for a couple of providers – they went from paying almost £1000 per year for an ineffective site that they had pay each time for updates – to having a new site that cost them just £60 per year and they can update themselves simply (took them 15 minutes to learn).
We will also show you how to turbo boost your social media as well…
A platform to reach, communicate with, and manage your clients
We will help you reach and manage your customers via our platform (it’s what we are working on now) – think of a non-evil airBnB but for outdoor experiences. We are not looking to canibalise your existing customers (but maybe help manage them better), but help you find new and more customers – decrease unused spaces on your events, promote new events, manage bookings and payments etc.
We have a few more ideas too and would love to run them by you (partly for research purposes so we know what’s most important but partly also to excite you by the future opportunity).
We are starting off slowly – but are ready to start promoting events now prior to the initial full platform coming onboard later in the year.
Jon Dodd
Chief Expert in Wow!
Jon founded and ran (for 21 years) a leading design consultancy that specialised in improving customer experience for software, websites and real life experiences. Key clients were BBC, EasyJet, HSBC, Virgin Holidays, BA, Historic Royal Palaces, Kew Gardens, Imperial Business School the UK government. He sold the business in 2018 and this allowed him to concentrate on his passion for the outdoors and pretend to be an athlete.
He owns 2 hostels: Almond Lodge Helvellyn & Almond Lodge Brecon Beacons (bought and rennovated in 2024) – he spends a lot of time in the Lakes and Wales and a lot of time in the wonderful outdoors. In 2024 he completed the Winter Spine race (non-stop 268 miles) and the followed up with the Dragons Back race (6 consecutive ultras over 6 days) then the Northern traverse (190 miles non-stoo) – 3 of the UKs toughest ultras. Upcoming he has the Lakeland 100, the Winter Spine, and Cape Wrath Ultra.
Over the last 6 years, since not being tied to a desk and computer all day, he has met many many people with a passion for the outdoors – both providers and consumers of outdoor experiences. He thought he would apply some of his expertise from his former life to trying to help make access to these experiences better – hence the formation of experts in wow.