Welcome to Spanish Fiestas..

The internet can be a faceless world where anyone can pretend to be anything they wish.

I'd like to use this page to give you a little background to myself and to Spanish Fiestas to prove to you that we are real and that you can have every confidence in dealing with us.

Background ...

My name is Gerry. I live in Southern Spain with my wife Kirsty. Originally I'm from a town called Warrington in the north-west of England. In 1981 I went to Lancaster University and graduated in Economics.

After some time travelling in Australia I went To Bristol University and obtained a postgraduate teacher training certificate in Economics and Business Studies which allowed me to move to Spain and take up my first post as an Economics teacher in Mallorca.

In 1991 I became head of Economics at a British school in Madrid where I met Kirsty. She was the computer teacher.

Birth of Spanish Fiestas ...

In September 1994 the travel bug was too strong and we left London Gatwick for Kathmandu at the beginning of a year travelling around the world. It was during this year that the idea of Spanish Fiestas arose.

Back in Spain a year later we set up an English language teaching business in the village of Miraflores de la Sierra near Madrid which Kirsty ran while I got a job in the Business Studies department of Madrid University.

After much preparation, our first Spanish Fiestas customers arrived in 1996 when we began offering cultural and sporting city breaks to Madrid and Barcelona.  

For the next five years we slowly expanded our city breaks and began offering small group tours which included visits to the great Moorish cities of Andalucia ... Granada, Seville and Cordoba.

Spanish Fiestas Goes Full Time ...

In June 2001 we decided that it was time for me to work full time with Spanish Fiestas as there simply wasn't enough time in a day to balance a part-time travel business with a full-time teaching job.  

We moved away from Madrid (I can't stand traffic jams as anyone who has toured with me will testify!) to the south of Spain ...why be 5 hours from the sea when you can be 5 minutes? One of the beauties of internet based businesses is the geographical flexibility!

Today Spanish Fiestas is a private limited company which employs Kirsty and I full time offering a whole range of travel related services in Spain. Over the years we've developed valuable partnerships with other agencies and work closely with them in offering a continuously expanding selection of activities all over the country.

Many years of travelling around Spain have provided us with invaluable knowledge of our destinations. We are constantly adding new information to our website which is now in the region of 2000 pages of valuable content which includes great recommendations on where to go, what to do, where to stay and where to eat.

The Beauty of Working in Cyberspace ...

Most of the time we've spent building Spanish Fiestas has been sat at computers in Spain, however, we started to wonder how easy it would be to spend extended periods of time outside Spain whilst still keeping on top of the work. So in November 2005, our quietest period of the year, we travelled to Asia for 6 weeks travelling in Vietnam, Laos and Hong Kong. The following year over the same period we went to Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. As a result of this we created a website with useful information about South East Asia which is now live at Vietnam Travel Guide.

The travel bug had been fed but it wanted more so we started talking about maybe spending an extended period of time in Australia. After explaining our plans to the Australian Embassy we were granted a 12 month visa and headed there via New Zealand in November 2007. Equipped with a new laptop we then travelled around Australia in our Ford Falcon station wagon for much of the year stopping off for extended periods in apartments with wireless internet connections to ensure that we were always on top of our website work. Since returning Kirsty has been working on yet another website which will prove a useful travel guide for visitors to Australia and especially Queensland. You can take a look at Brisbane and Beyond.

Turn your Passion into a Profitable Business ...

We've been online since May 1998 and it's taken literally thousands of hours of trial and error to get the Spanish Fiestas website to what it is today. I've lost count of the number of ebooks I've bought and studied to help not only create a good site but also to attract traffic to it. In addition I subscribe to all kinds of internet marketing newsletters and have spent a small fortune on useful software.

None of this is necessary any longer thanks to an integrated software package from a Montreal based company which helps you build your site, attract huge amounts of traffic and make sales through a whole range of money making avenues. Anyone can now turn their interest into a profitable business. I wish it had been around when we started the Spanish Fiestas site. Both our other sites mentioned above are developed using this incredible software package called Site Build It. To learn more about how to turn your interests and hobbies into a profitable business take a look at the SBI website.

Best Wishes ...

Gerry & Kirsty