| who are we? |
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i-escape.com is the trading name of Ram Tinto Associates Ltd, a UK-registered company based in London. Our core team includes the two founders, Laila Ram (a former management consultant) and Nikki Tinto (a former investigator), Michael Cullen (an established travel author and consultant) and Aidan Forestier-Walker. All four have spent many years travelling extensively to some of the world's most far-flung locations. We also work very closely with a team of freelance photographers, journalists, creative writers and travel industry experts who travel the world visiting and reviewing new places for us.
Are you interested in joining our team? Click here for our latest job vacancies.
Laila Ram, Founder
Director, Strategy and Finance
Contact: 
 After years of advising people on how to run their businesses, Laila Ram decided to try it out for herself. Armed with 5 years of management consultancy experience, an MBA from Columbia Business School in New York and having been Strategic Development Director for several small companies, she decided to set up her own business in something she was really passionate about: travel.
Laila grew up living in Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, India, the UK and US, and has been travelling ever since. She teamed up with one of her best friends and travelling companion on many far-flung trips to create i-escape.com. Based initially on all the great places they had discovered during their travels, i-escape.com has now grown into a fantastic collection of places that Laila and Nikki dream of visiting when they get a chance to get out of the office!
Geographical expertise: Sri Lanka, India, Maldives, Iceland, Morocco
Nikki Tinto, Founder
Director, Research and Content
Contact: 
 Nikki developed her flair for uncovering secrets through 10 years working as a senior consultant to the world’s largest investigations firms. Here she located hidden assets of former foreign heads of state, investigated environmental and human rights issues and provided critical intelligence to some of the UK’s most significant corporate mergers and acquisitions.
With her love of travel and adventure, a degree in Geography from Exeter University, and a natural thirst for discovering the special and unusual, Nikki spent her time between investigations contracts seeking out some of the worlds most unspoilt locations. She has travelled in over 40 countries, including most of South America where she enjoyed two years painting surreal murals in mountain villages, sampling the local cactus juice and avoiding piranhas in the Amazon. After many years of friends using her as a source of new and interesting places to stay, the internet has finally provided the perfect channel through which she can share her discoveries.
Geographical expertise: Latin America, Spain (including Mallorca), Thailand, Bali
Michael Cullen
Editor
Contact: 
 Michael has always been a keen linguist, explorer, writer and photographer, so to carve out the ultimate niche in travel writing - and then see it take off as a business - is like paying a cat to sunbathe. After joining i-escape at its genesis in 2001, he reviewed many of the places on this site, and has edited most of the rest. His multinational background encompasses Greece (where he was born and brought up), France (where he went to school), Africa (where he did the backpacker thing) and more recently Spain, Italy and Austria (where he leads occasional walking tours - as a break from all this strenuous hotel reviewing). He has also written guidebooks for Sawdays, Sunflower, Lonely Planet and Cicerone, published articles in UK travel magazines, and sells photos from his albums.
Geographical expertise: Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Turkey, Zanzibar, Morocco, South Africa, Thailand, Caribbean
Aidan Forestier-Walker
Director of Operations
Contact: aidan@i-escape.com
 Having been bitten as a teenager by the travel bug whilst tripping in South America, Aidan never quite escaped the draw of making the most of every holiday. With a degree in Commerce at Edinburgh University and a decade ensconced in the aerospace industry, a return flight to his passion of travel was realized when his wife Nikki Tinto asked for help in expanding i-escape. Having always wished to marry work with pleasure, what could be better. Afterall, even before joining the business, a good many i-escape hotels had already been savoured. With a growing team, and a deep desire to preserve the unique edge that i-escape has won, Aidan brings with him management experience from a hi-tech industry and inside knowledge to run and deliver its increasingly busy operation.
Geographical expertise: Brazil, Spain (including Mallorca), Bali, Iceland
Nadine Mellor
New Content Editor
Contact: nadine@i-escape.com
 Nadine believes that one should say yes to every invitation and possibility of adventure. This has taken her places far and wide from Australia to Zimbabwe via Thailand, Vietnam, Rajasthan, Morocco, Italy, Turkey, Guatemala, the British Isles and now San Francisco. After a long career in film and television in both the UK and Australia (award-winning news programmes, programme sales and marketing, and film and drama development and production) it was time for a change. Now the point person for new hotels going onto the site, setting up review trips and adding new content, she also assists with web marketing. And she still does cartwheels everywhere she goes.
Geographical expertise: Australia, UK, Ireland, Guatemala, Rajasthan, France, US
Glenda May Richards
Bookings Consultant
Contact: 
 Glenda began her eclectic career in her native country of Canada, where she worked as a radio and television journalist in a range of jobs from news presenter to reporter to documentary producer to occasional weather girl! After a stint on the stage as an actress and a sojourn in the Caribbean writing and performing live shows for corporate retreats, Glenda made a permanent move to London where she parlayed her skills into the new media world – developing interactive television and editing/writing internet content for various websites. Glenda edits the i-escape newsletter, manages client bookings and help queries, writes and updates hotel reviews and tries to keep au courant with current trends in the the busy travel industry.
Geographical expertise: Spain, Italy, France, United Kingdom, Morocco, Mexico
Kate Parsons
Bookings Consultant
Contact: kate@i-escape.com
 Kate has spent the last 5 years working in some of London’s top restaurants and felt that she would like to combine her love of travel with her appreciation of good food and where to find it across the world. Kate has had varied travel experiences from living in North Carolina and California, USA, to backpacking in India and the Greek Islands as well as many a short break exploring in Morocco, Spain, France and Italy and wherever else good food can be found. She brings with her enthusiasm and energy and will look forward to assisting with your booking enquiries, responding to feedback and advising you on where to go and what to eat.
Geographical expertise: USA, India, Morocco, Italy, Australia.
Emilie Witham
Bookings Consultant
Contact: emilie@i-escape.com
 Emilie recently helped to build a playground in Chile as part of a Raleigh International community project, and spent 6 months travelling around Bolivia and Argentina afterwards. Before that she learned Spanish in Barcelona, interrailed through western Europe and taught tourism in Weston College near Bristol. Her sights are now set on completing her MA in Responsible Tourism at Greenwich University, and assisting the Bristol-based i-escape team with booking enquiries.
Geographical expertise: Spain, South America
Liz Simpson
Assistant Editor
Contact: liz@i-escape.com
 Ever since interrailing around Europe aged 18, Liz has spent most of her free time and all of her money travelling: she's backpacked around all 5 continents and still dreams of going to Antarctica. Highlights were island-hopping around the Caribbean, camel-trekking in the Sahara and trying to pitch a tent on Bolivia's salt plains. After 5 years as a writer/sub-editor on various London magazines including Glamour, she began to dream of exploring in a far more stylish way. And where better than i-escape? She now helps write and edit our famously informative hotel reviews, keep our destination guides up to date - and occasionally gets to add to her already impressive travel-CV.
Geographical expertise: Europe (Iceland, Spain, France, Italy), Chile, Mexico, Morocco, Thailand, Australasia
Emma Taylor
UK hotels
Contact: emma@i-escape.com
 Emma has always had a penchant for nice hotels. So when the opportunity of a job with i-escape came up, she jumped at the chance! Like other members of the i-escape team, she’s had a varied career, and has a great love of travel that has taken her from the vineyards of South Africa to the deserts of Namibia, and the beaches of the Caribbean to the kitchens of Thailand. She now looks after i-escape's growing portfolio of hotels in the UK, as well as project-managing some exciting site developments in the pipeline. And occasionally she gets to review a few hotels herself, most recently in South Africa and Italy, two countries which she loves.
Geographical expertise: Sri Lanka, Kerala, Zanzibar, South Africa, Thailand, Italy, Maldives, UK
Fiona Reece
PR officer
Contact: fiona@fionareece.com
 Fiona has spent the last 15 years combining her lust for travel with her job as a public relations consultant. Her journeys have taken her from Tasmania, where she was snowed in on a press trip, via Namibia, advising the Tourist Board on their promotion strategy, to the Caribbean to shadow a wedding planner with full BBC crew in tow. She feels equally at home in 5 star luxury as in a tent half way up Kilimanjaro or hiking the Inca Trail. She launched her own specialist travel PR consultancy, Fiona Reece PR, in June 2007 and makes sure that i-escape.com is always top of mind with the country’s media.
Shawn Richards
Webmaster
Contact: Visit Ink
 Shawn Richards is the CEO of Ink, a highly specialised new media company involved with the original development of i-escape.com. Ink has created advanced web applications for the property, aviation and travel industries. i-escape continually benefits from proven technology that it has developed for mission-critical search and booking engines.
Ink provides ongoing technical support and design expertise to the i-escape team helping to keep the site safe and performing well.
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| Contributors |
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Lisa Young
 Lisa is a London-based freelance photographer and travel writer and a founding member of www.i-escape.com. Lisa spent three years travelling the world photographing and gathering information for the launch of the site. Her work can be seen throughout www.i-escape.com. Today, Lisa produces photos and articles about her escapades which have taken her to over 50 countries. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications internationally, including The Times, Sunday Telegraph, Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Times Travel magazine and Harpers Bazaar. Clients have included Warner Brothers and the GSM Association. Articles include discovering the revolution trail in Cuba; skiing in the Arctic Circle; horse safaris in Kenya and riding a Harley-Davidson through Australia’s outback. Lisa also photographs portraits for private and corporate clients in the UK - for rates and details on Lisa's portfolio including film and TV work, visit her website.
Tom Bell
 As a small boy growing up in a grey country, Tom Bell spent most of his time daydreaming of far-flung exotic lands. After paying off his university overdraft, he headed for Australia with a deep conviction that he would find an Australian wife, thus ensuring himself a life of idle, sun-drenched pleasure. Unfortunately for him (but not perhaps, Australia) he was deported two years after he arrived. Although he is still searching for an Australian wife, he passes his time writing the Alastair Sawday British Hotel guide and has visited many places for i-escape in Spain, France, Portugal and most recently all over Indochina.
Guy Hunter-Watts
 Guy’s life changed when, after graduating in Spanish from Bristol, he discovered Crete and the Mediterranean. After a decade of drifting from good beach to good beach, he spent the next ten years leading tours in India, South America and Mongolia. Guy eventually put down roots in Andalucia where he combines work as a freelance walking guide and writer with running a small guesthouse. His first taste of travel writing was when he set off in a battered old van to visit nearly 300 B&Bs in France for the Sawday guide. Since then he has contributed to several travel guides and has written his own guide to the best walks in Andalucia. Guy knows the mountains of his part of the world as well as most shepherds and is currently charting a new coast to coast walk, linking the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. His reviews for i-escape took him to Andalucia, South Africa, Morocco and Tanzania. His most valued possession: his walking boots.
Christabelle Dilks
 i-escape's Miss Argentina, Christabelle fell in love with Argentina - and an Argentine man - at 16. But when the Falklands war started, she had to leave true love behind. She acted at the National Theatre, made short films, and worked at Channel 4 and the BBC, but walked out to return to Argentina for the first time in 20 years – and fell in love all over again. She travelled the entire country to write the Footprint guide, and even a series of unsuitable Argentine men, endless overnight buses, and an incident in La Boca did not dim her passion for the place. Making documentaries in remote northwest Argentina led her along a lesser known Inca trail up Mount Llullaillaco, where at 6,500m she nearly became the next human offering. Christabelle is writing TV drama and a feature film set in Argentina, while planning her eco-home in the Valles Calchaquiés. She has written for the Guardian, Wanderlust, Red magazine, and makes regular appearances on Radio 4’s Excess Baggage.
Lesley Gillilan
 While growing up in Cornwall, Lesley didn’t see much of the world beyond Daymer Bay and Bodmin Moor (her parents’ idea of long-haul was a trip to Somerset); and she didn’t board a plane until she was nearly 30. She’s been making up for it ever since, and when she meandered into a career in journalism (from art school to editing, via a succession of dead-end jobs) she decided to go freelance so she could travel whenever the mood, or the money, took her. Writing for the national press (Guardian, Telegraph and FT, among others), her specialist subjects are property, interior design and
travel - a combination which perhaps explains her love of hotels. Aside from writing reviews for i-escape, she is currently researching a new guide book - to Cornwall. Geographical expertise: India, Turkey, southern Europe, America and the UK.
Mary-Anne Denison-Pender
 When Mary-Anne first travelled to India 19 years ago, she fell in love with it immediately. After many more trips to India and working for several prestigious UK travel companies as their India specialist, she set up her own business MAhout in April 2000. She has been lucky enough to have discovered a few of the country’s many hidden secrets – many of which lie in the wondrous hotels scattered around. MAhout now represents these places and endeavours to put some of India’s finest hotels ‘on the map’, by acting as their ‘ambassador’ in the UK. During the course of her 17 years in the travel trade Mary-Anne has built up a strong and recognised reputation and is considered one of the UK’s leading experts on India. She has reviewed most of i-escape‘s featured properties in Rajasthan.
Caroline Sylger-Jones (née Sylge)
 Caroline Sylge hopes she will never be cured of the travel bug. Author of the Footprint travel resource guide Body and Soul Escapes, she splits her time between writing in a 1930s villa in Devon and moving about the world, and is particularly passionate about India – she’s reviewed properties in Sikkim, Kerala and Goa for i-escape.com and contributed to books on the sub-continent for Rough Guides, Fodor's and Alastair Sawday's. Her features on travel, wellbeing, food and books have appeared in Condé Nast Traveller, Wanderlust, The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, BA High Life, The Guardian, The Times, the Independent on Sunday, the London Evening Standard and the New Statesman. She also sells her photographs through www.alamy.com.
Abigail Hole
 Abigail lived in Hong Kong for three years from 1997, writing and editing books for China and Vietnam. She travelled around the region frequently, from weekends in Shanghai to months in Thailand. After editing books in Lonely Planet’s London office, she worked on their India, Rajasthan, Delhi & Agra, Portugal, Wales, Tunisia, Best of Rome, Africa on a Shoestring, Britain and England guides, as well as contributing to Out to Eat – London, the Gap Year Book, Code Green and the Africa Book. Other travel journalism has appeared in the Guardian, Marie Claire, Wanderlust, the LA Times, the Denver Post, Toronto Sun, the San Francisco Chronicle, on BBC radio, and she writes for Alastair Sawday’s Special Places to Stay. Having once spent the night in a yard with chickens and goats in Mauretania, writing for i-escape has introduced her to a new, wonderfully comfortable realm of travel.
Viv Monahan
 Viv Monahan is a freelance investigator, travel consultant and writer. Her two published novels, ‘Dangerous Games’ and ‘Storm Fever’, which were written under her pen name, Vivien Leyland, feature exotic destinations as characters in their own right. With Masters Degrees in Philosophy and Spanish, Viv suffers from terminal itchy feet, a condition that, over the last decade, has been partially alleviated by frequent, long trips to Bali. After several years of being used as an informal travel consultant by various Internet Forums (and family members), Viv has sought out a collection of eclectic hideaways on small but beautifully formed islands and in Marrakech for i-escape. Thanks to two expensive language courses, she now speaks taxi-Indonesian almost fluently.
Joyce Copeland
 Joyce Copeland loves nothing better than bumping down an unpaved road to a unique hotel the rest of the world hasn’t yet discovered. She began her career as a writer and managing editor for Endless Vacation magazine, published by holiday exchange pioneer Resort Condominiums International. She veered off course during the 90s, writing marketing copy for Silicon Valley tech companies and authoring four career-related books. Today her travel articles appear in airline magazines, newspapers and travel industry trade publications. She’s the author of Renting Paradise a series of e-guidebooks reviewing unique vacation homes in Northern California. On review trips to Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay for i-escape, Joyce teams with her husband Gary, a former professional photographer whose fluent Spanish often saves the day.
Laura Dixon
 Laura began her career in travel with a dream about Iceland. Three months later, she found herself writing a book for Footprint about Reykjavik and the puffin hunters, geyser watchers and trend setters of the world's most northerly city. Since then, she's written and edited over 20 books for Footprint, from Northern Pakistan to Tallinn and Cardiff. She currently works as a freelance travel writer and part-time short story writer, contributing to the likes of Zest, Coast, the Express, ASOS, Closer and The London Paper. For i-escape, she's experienced colonial splendour and back-to-nature safari camps in Sri Lanka, as well boutique hideaways in the depths of Scotland.
Cathy Teesdale
 An award-winning photographer specialising in travel, reportage, portraits and weddings, Cathy gained an early appreciation of beauty growing up with artist parents in a Gloucestershire mansion. While reading English at Exeter University her maverick spirit led to a near-fatal Devon cliff fall, but she survived to forge a career as a freelance feature writer, editor and photographer for a wide range of clients. Now blissfully Brighton-based, she has so far had adventures in Europe and America, Africa, the Caribbean and South East Asia and reviewed and photographed hidden oases in Goa, Sri Lanka and Venice for i-escape. To view her portfolio, visit www.cathyteesdale.com.
Liz Williams
 Liz attributes her inherent wanderlust to an enviable childhood spent in South East Asia, South America and the Caribbean. After a stint at the BBC she found her niche for a while as Promotions Editor for Conde Nast Traveller, which enabled her to investigate some of the finest hotels and destinations around the world. But it was a temptation which proved too great to resist and, having completed a round-the-world trip (from Patagonia to Mongolia), she now combines her passion for travel with her accumulated knowledge and experience, in freelance travel writing. For i-escape she checked out the very best that the Maldives and Chile have to offer, from island hideaways to magnificent haciendas.
Yasmin Boland
 Yasmin Boland has been a fulltime writer since she was 20 and is one of those Australians who lives by the maxim "have laptop, will travel". As such, she spends part of the year in Bondi, Sydney, and the other part in Paris - or en route between the two. She has contributed to publications, including She, B, Playboy, Elle, the Sydney Morning Herald and the London Evening Standard. Having stayed at some of the best hotels in Sri Lanka and Southern India on behalf of i-escape.com, she is also the author of two books: a fun, non-fiction work called Cosmic Love and a novel titled Carole King Is An Alien.
Other contributing writers and photographers to our site include Stuart Pearce, Britt Rohde, Gail Simmons, Davina McKail, Lucia Appleby, Anita Naik, Justin Fox, Lisa Tsering, Carey Stevenson, Frances Bernon, Gemma Pitcher, Sue Carpenter, Lanie Goodman, James Alexander, Arabella Daniells, Charlotte Sinclair, Gordon Baker and Philip Worman. |
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