We often get asked why we decided to publish online travel guides, and why we called them "Escapes Travel Guides".

It all began in March 2003, as a result of genuine interest shown in the answer to the typical Monday morning question "What did you do at the weekend?". While colleagues had stayed home, watched TV, gone shopping or done nothing, we always had something fresh and new to talk about.

We discovered there were no guides available on the internet, so when someone suggested starting a website, we thought "why not!".

The next dilemma was what to call the site. As we were generally pretty broke at that time, most of our trips involved youth hostels, visiting free museums, cheap pubs and walks, we decided on "Cheap-Escapes".

What followed came as a complete surprise. Cheap-Escapes was quickly picked up by the "big-three" search engines — Google, Yahoo! and MSN — and started getting visits from all around the world. Prior to Google's "Florida update", our site ranked No. 1 on Google for the search term "cheap weekends away". Traffic soared, with visitor numbers consistently reaching between 30,000 and 60,000 each month.

As personal finances improved slightly, we began staying in B&Bs and guest-houses, with the occasional night at a luxury hotel. We decided these articles didn't really fit with the existing content of "Cheap-Escapes" as it was, and as a result, "Escapes Travel Guides" was born.

Our hostels content was moved and relaunched as Hostel-Escapes, and our Yorkshire content has been republished and much expanded as Yorkshire-Escapes.com.  We also launched Luxury-Escapes.com which has its focus strictly at the top end of the market.

The guides receive more than 500,000 visitors each month, rising steadily as we add more content, and continue to rank extremely well in the search engines. In fact, our Yorkshire-Escapes guide currently receives more than double the monthly traffic of the official Yorkshire Tourist Board's visitor site.  With the internet already having overtaken traditional media as a tool to search for, plan and book travel, our popular sites are convenient, and globally accessible, 24/7.

Escapes Travel Guides are produced and edited by Jacki Sweeting.