Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's the last day of

April. I'm just back from beautiful Croatia and while I was there I took a grey line day trip tour

from Split to the lovely national park of Krka, about an hour and a half away, and just down river from there,

the fine medieval town of Skraddin. Actually, it's a marina there as well, beloved of Bill Gates.

Apparently, he shows up every summer. What was really interesting about it, though,

was the way the tour was conducted.

The group leader was a guy called Mate.

Really interesting, he spends part of his time as a school teacher, the rest as a tour guide.

There were 51 of us on the bus, and, well, he handled us better than any school trip I've been on and better than the

average day trip as well something I simply hadn't seen before was the use of WhatsApp to

help everybody on the trip once we were on the road Matte came along and asked us to scan the code that would get us into the

WhatsApp group. So yes, 51 of us plus Matte himself all suddenly signed up for a WhatsApp group

to coordinate this very complex day because it involved people going off on their own to look

at the beautiful

waterfalls and also pick a boat departure sailing downstream to Scradion and everyone had to be back

on time.

When I started this job when I was like a fresh young tour guide, I would take everyone with me.

Like I would just say, follow me, please. What would

happen? We will start to take a longer way. In the end, I will end up alone. Does everyone

have a smart mode? Yeah, always check it out. If that's not the case, then I ask that person to

stick with me all the time. It happened to me like maybe one or two times in my career, but very rarely everyone.

I always check that person have the iPhone, oh sorry, the smartphone and the internet.

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