Steve: And now I'm going to have an opportunity to talk to some of the people that work here at BCAA. My first guest here is Nither-beg your pardon?
Maninder: My name is Maninder.
Steve: Maninder. All right. Now, Maninder, you are involved in a very specific area of preparing information and services for people who want to travel with BCAA. Could you explain exactly what you do?
Maninder: My name is Maninder, and I am a Membership Services Counselor at BCAA. What basically we do is prepare TripTik. So, what a TripTik is is when one of our members goes into a sales center and they want to go to a certain place, and one of our counselors at the sales center, she marks a map where they want to go, and then we get it here. What we do is we prepare the TripTik, which is basically a personalized strip map booklet that shows your routing in a compact, easy-to-read series of pages. Basically, it shows the lodging, gas stations, restaurants, everything along your route.
Steve: Are you saying that this service is provided free? Really, so I could go into a BCAA office, say I want to go to [inaudible] and I want to stop along the way, and I don't know where are the nice places to stop or stay or swim, or whatever, that you would trace this out, and then how would this information come back to me? Maninder: Yes, this is free of service. Actually, you can come back and pick up at the sales center, or we can certainly mail it out to you, and we also provide tour books with it, if you need. What a tour book is, is basically it's for, like, we have tour books of every city and town-most of them-and it basically provides information of the city, and where the restaurants are, and the places to see, and everything. Steve: But is this something that's sort of an emailed itinerary, or is it a piece of paper? And is there a map with stuff drawn on it, and a list of places? How does it work, exactly?
Maninder: Well, the TripTik is a booklet, as I explained, and it's got strip maps, which explains your route, and along with it you also get your marked map, with the route that you're taking, and yes, along the route it also shows, like, restaurants and places you can stop at. Steve: Well, that sounds great. Is that your full-I mean, you have such a demand for these itineraries that that is your full-time job, to prepare itineraries for people?
Maninder: Yes, that's what we do. Yes. And also, if you want, you can also go to bcaa.com, and we can also do an ITT, which is an Internet TripTik, and it also basically shows the same information as what we do here.
Steve: So you must-do you ever feel you'd like to go on some of these trips that you're preparing for other people? Maninder: Yes, always.
Steve: So you must be pretty expert, then, on where to go, and you probably feel as if you've traveled to every little nook and cranny of BC? Maninder: Oh, yes. I always wanted to travel across Canada. A lot of people go across Canada, and that's the most popular one, or, like, down the Oregon coast and down to L.A. Basically, the two popular ones we get.
Steve: Oh, I see. It's not limited to BC, it's basically North America. Maninder: Yes, it's anywhere in North America, and Mexico we also do. Steve: Oh, really? I didn't know that. So, you know, actually my wife and I were thinking of going down to Mexico and we don't know it very well, so the idea would be to go into BCAA's office somewhere, and then our request would show up on your desk, and you would plan our itinerary for us. Maninder: Yes, that's exactly true. Steve: Thank you very much.
Maninder: You're welcome. You're very welcome
