Scratching That (TravelFleas) Itch
Do you or your geo-hound have fleas?
The four American founders of TravelFleas, a new signature tag, certainly hope so. In fact, Mike, Karen, John and Deborah would eventually like their tiny metal tags to infest caches and player kit-bags across the globe.
The friends’ bid for world domination began a few months back when they revealed their patent-pending TravelFleas design to an unsuspecting public.
Much like the canine equivalents, these “small, brightly coloured” tags attach themselves to any trackable to go – as the company’s logo says – “along for the ride”.
“By themselves, TravelFleas are not trackable,” spokesman Mike explains. “With our TravelFleas tags, geocachers can leave a personalised tag in a cache as a signature item or attach them to a TB.”
Spanning 31.75 x 12.7 millimetres (about a third of the size of a regular TB), each TravelFleas tag is customised with the geo-name of its host. A pack of 10 costs just US$9.99 (NZ$12), while 30 tags are US$25.99 from the TravelFleas store – if you can choose between the 12 shades available.
“We decided to offer a diverse colour choice to reflect the many geocaching personalities out there, but C3 – Green seems the most popular. Co-incidentally, it also happens to be the original colour of our TravelFleas tag.”
When the partners first got a flea in their collective ear about going into business, Mike says their goal was to create a signature tag “that was safe, fun, affordable” and would make “other geocachers actually take notice”.
“On our geocaching adventures, we encountered several caches with sigs left behind that we felt were too personal to be safe. We came across one, a laminated card, that had a picture of a young girl with her real name included. We have also found many caches where the logs were wet and illegible.”
He believes TravelFleas could also help combat the high number of TB and geocoin losses each year. “Unfortunately, trackables go missing for a number of reasons – but we have found that when geocachers add a personal attachment with their TravelFleas, those trackables tend to continue on their journey. Perhaps it is strength in the numbers?”
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