Saint Lucia Top Photographer Wins TripAdvisor Award

Top St Lucia Photographer Kirk Elliott, was recently awarded a Trip Advisor Certificate of Excellence for his St Lucia Photo Tour.

The award comes just one year after Elliott started the St Lucia Photo Tour as a way to share the best of his St Lucia with visitors, drawing on his 20+ years of commercial photography experience to teach them how to get the most out of their digital cameras. When considering things to do in St Lucia this tour is different from any of the other St Lucia tours because of its hands on educational component taught in the everyday local places Elliott introduces photo enthusiasts to: places like the Castries Fish Market with fish vendors plying their trade and the Hardest Hard Restaurant for a truly authentic St Lucian lunch. Elliott says: “The St Lucia Photo Tour is a cultural immersion intertwined with real world advanced photography training.”

Judging from the overwhelming 5 star reviews patrons have posted on Trip Advisor the St Lucia Photo Tour has definitely struck a chord with satisfied clients:

“…We were amateurs who have taken a Canon Beginners’ class and learned more on our tour with Kirk in a few hours than we did at our day long Canon class.”

… Molly Mc Dowell, USA “Best Refresher in the Best Place with the Best Person, Thanks to Kirk”

… Stephen Mc Closkey, USA “After reading the reviews about Kirk’s Photo Tour, it became evident that St Lucia was our priority vacation destination and we were very thrilled at the prospect of learning from Kirk.”

… Jean Strang, Canada Strang explained to Elliott that she and her husband had initially planned to vacation in Barbados but choose St Lucia because they really wanted to do the photo tour.

The full list of nearly 100 Trip Advisor reviews can be found at http://StLuciaByKirk.com/ Reviews and the actual photo tour description can be seen at http://StLuciaByKirk.com/st-lucia-photo-tour “Most vacationers have sophisticated digital cameras which they use in the auto mode simply because they are daunted by the sheer number of buttons on today’s digital cameras” explained Elliott when asked what inspired him to create this tour. “The idea to list the tour on Trip Advisor came out of a workshop conducted by the St Lucia Hotel and Tourism Association (SLHTA) to help its members make the most of online marketing for their businesses” Elliott continued, “…and starting a Trip Advisor listing is the best things I ever did for the business.”

Elliott explained that he is strategic in his selection of the “keywords” used to attract visitors to his website, adding: “…it is part science and part magic that ultimately leads a website viewer to the conclusion that they simply must do the St Lucia Photo Tour.”

Elliott then over-delivers on all that the Photo Tour promises then later follows up with clients thus ensuring the ultimate user experience.

The St Lucia Photo Tour provides employment for a small team and Elliott is creating an online version of his unique brand of photographic training, allowing him to hire even more young St Lucians as he makes the photo tour available to people all over the world rather than just visitors to St Lucia. When asked about the potential of the internet to grow other local tourism businesses Elliott explained: “To benefit from the multibillion dollar world of online business, it is vitally important that in St Lucia, we must become creators of content for consumption by an information hungry world and not simply remain consumers of content created by others.”

Elliott salutes the efforts of the SLHTA in helping its members grow their businesses, saying: “I would like to see both the government and other private sector organizations devote more resources to helping more local entrepreneurs develop an effective online presence as a pathway towards the eradication of poverty in the first instance followed by wealth creation as a natural progression that will help grow our local economy.”

Elliott congratulates all of the other local businesses that received Trip Advisor Certificates of Excellence, as well as those that made it into the Trip Advisor Hall of Fame and is thankful to his many clients who took time out of their busy schedules to post reviews on Trip Advisor.

Kirk Elliott is a St Lucia Photographer passionate about photography and St Lucia. He is on a mission to share St Lucia’s stunningly spectacular beauty with visitors, build local capacity, utilize tourism for poverty eradication and wealth creation, while at the same time working to rid the world of bad photography – One Photo Enthusiast at a time.