Luxury biking and walking tour operator, Butterfield & Robinson, takes an unusual approach to travel catalogs. Through "mood" images and a personal "tone of voice," it sells the experience of taking a B&R tour as much as the wonders of the destination itself.

There may be only one Machu Picchu and one Great Wall of China in all the world, but when it comes to travel brochures, "you've seen one, you seen them all." Tour catalogs have become a cliche, featuring the obligatory famous landmark photos and tersely worded itineraries-leaving would-be travelers to base their choice of tour packages solely on route and price. A rare exception is the travel guides of Butterfield & Robinson (B&R), a Toronto-based tour operator that has been conducting biking and walking trips to non-urban regions of the world since 1966.

Butterfield & Robinson tour catalogs still present the iconographic beauty shots that establish a sense of place, but where they veer from the well-trod marketing path is in drawing distinctions of what it is like to take a B&R tour. Over the past 35 years, no two B&R trip guidebooks have been the same. Each guide has a unique photographic theme, illustrative style, color palette and copy tone, while still clearly showing that it emanates from the same source. Photographs run the gamut from postcard scenics and soft-focus mood images to sepia-toned historical shots and detailed close-ups, along with "snapshots" and more formally posed pictures of happy B&R travelers. B&R catalogs also make extensive use of illustrations in styles ranging from sketchbook drawings to primitive art to hard-edged computer graphics.

The approach "parallels the experience," says designer/illustrator Frank Viva of Viva Dolan, the Toronto-based creative agency that has been designing and writing B&R's marketing materials since 1993. "It says something about the creativity employed by Butterfield & Robinson's research and development department in coming up with new itineraries and varying old ones. B&R trips are serendipitous and not so regimented that surprises can't happen. You meet locals. They are anything but a bus tour."

This is a point that B&R is eager to stress. "One of the problems we face is how do you sell a group tour when you are selling to people who don't want to go on tours," says Michael Liss, who has handled B&R's marketing for the past ten years. "These are people who like being talked to on a personal level and not just herded along in a bus."

B&R walking and biking tours, which go to popular non-urban locales, traverse ancient trails, country roads, mountain paths and open fields - and cost upwards of $5,000. "We are to active travel what the boutique hotel is to the hotel business. Our audience is a very sophisticated group," explains Liss.

But convincing well-heeled travelers that they would enjoy an experience with B&R that they could not acquire on their own is no easy task. The 1998 catalog tackled this issue straight-on with the headline, "I'd never go on a group tour," followed by an explanation of how B&R travelers are free to set their own pace, yet enjoy first-class accommodations and dining, specially arranged tours, and the luxury of having a B&R van sweeping over their route to offer refreshments, pick up purchases made along the way or just give weary travelers a lift to the next hotel where their luggage is waiting in their rooms.

"Our trips are crafted with special attention to details," says Liss. "We think about how the experience will unfold for you. Where it begins and ends. Which places you should see, and in what order. Where the highs are. Those are intangibles that we are selling. That stuff is so hard to explain in print. The difficulty is that a competitor can sell the same four hotels and get you to those places. On paper, it may look exactly the same and cost a third less money, and people are likely to say, 'Wait a minute! What's the difference?' Through the design of our brochures, we can convey that B&R trips are really more special."

Viva Dolan's strategy has been to use visual variety in marketing materials to express the B&R brand. "One of those key attributes," says Viva, "is a love for the unexpected. People who take these trips want to be surprised and delighted with a one-of-a-kind travel experience. They feel the same way about the marketing materials."

To elicit such a response, "each catalog must outdo the last, taking a creative approach that inspires people to keep it on their coffee tables and share it with friends," says Viva. Often, the imagery conveys a sense of a bygone era when the pace of travel was more leisurely, less crowded and less commercialized. Dreamy and exotic in mood, the pictures suggest wide-open spaces that appeal to adventurous spirits. The inclusion of casual photographs of recent B&R travelers communicates an intimate feeling that separates B&R trips from large, impersonal tours. In fact, most B&R tours average 17 people, with private groups, made up of family and friends, comprising the fastest-growing customer segment. Pictures of fellow travelers, trip guides and local people met along the way help to recreate some of the warmth and charm of a vacation "memory book."

The mood of the design is reinforced by the evocative tone of the accompanying text. Doug Dolan, who wrote fiction before going into partnership with Frank Viva ten years ago, brings the descriptive voice of a travel writer to the text. "It's a fiction writer's instinct to try to get in the precise physical details that set up a moment that everybody can relate to. It's not a marketing voice, but a sense of a real traveler talking," Dolan says.

That level of detail also helps people imagine whether a B&R trip is right for them. "People want to understand what it is like to be on this trip," says Dolan. "Who are the guides? What are their backgrounds? How does B&R move bikes from location to location? What happens if you get a flat, if you get thirsty while you're riding?" This type of information was barely covered in B&R catalogs before Viva Dolan came on. The early catalogs were organized to "sell the region, not so much the products," Viva recalls. "It wasn't doing a good job of conveying the fact that it was a biking or walking trip. I realized that the biggest barrier to new people buying into B&R was understanding what it's like being on a trip."

To do that, Viva Dolan has divided the main catalog into two sections: 1) an opening marketing section that talks about the advantages of B&R trips and features originally commissioned photographs and illustrations and 2) destination-specific "trip pages" relying heavily on stock images. A daunting amount of essential information needs to go on each trip page. Viva Dolan is charged with including roughly 14 levels of hierarchical information and presenting them in an attractive, easy-to-use format. "We need to tell them how many days and nights, where the trip starts and finishes, the activity level, whether its strenuous or light, the price, single supplement, departure dates, a day-by-day itinerary, an overall description of the trip, a photo with caption and a map. It has always been pretty relentless," admits Viva. "The design problem was in organizing the information so the hierarchy was clear, from the biggest to smallest, making sure that we direct people's eyes to the information."

Another problem was taking into account that few people read a tour catalog from start to finish. "Our theory is that people who receive B&R's catalogs fall into three groups: flippers, skimmers and readers," says Dolan. To make sure that some information reaches all of them, Dolan says he writes the copy "so that anyone can touch down and read it."

A hallmark of B&R trip guides is the maps, which change in design each and every year - not necessarily by choice. "At the beginning, we thought let's do digital maps in Illustrator and just update the information as needed," explains Viva, who started his career doing illustrations for such publications as The New York Times and Boston Globe. "But invariably some trip would swing up north of where our map was last year and it would eventually fall apart. Because the routes changed so much we had to redo them, it wasn't that much more work to rethink them again."

Changing the look of the maps each year has made it easier to develop a fresh and dramatically different design. If the overall mood is painterly and pastel, the maps will match. If the mood is sepia-toned and historical, the maps will complement that look too. "The maps become the hinge," says Liss. "If you add too many elements, you start losing it. It has to be cohesive. The whole thing has to work with the map."

One of the reasons that B&R marketing materials hang together so well is because there is never a disconnect between the design and the copy. As often as not, Viva comes up with the headline, although both he and Dolan reveal that they are so used to working together that they think as one. "When I am putting photography on a page, I start thinking of imaginary headlines. Suddenly I can see connections between photographs and heads. It sets up a kind of premise for the whole spread," says Viva."What it says and how it looks-we don't even think what the discussion is at the moment. Those two vectors converge in trying to make it fun, apropos and also the right line length," Dolan says. He also admits that he takes a "perverse pride" in not just writing to fit, but writing so there is not a single hyphen in the book. "It becomes an insane way of writing. I keep trying to find things that have a proper cadence to them and are compelling to read and also end exactly where you want them to end." The payoff is evident in the design, which demands sharp editing to achieve such perfectly balanced layouts.

That obsession is carried through in all the other collateral pieces that Viva Dolan produces for B&R. Along with the big annual trip guide, Viva Dolan develops smaller brochures for specialized programs such as B&R Expeditions and Family Trips and single-event offerings such as the Millennium trip and the 35th Anniversary Grand Tour. In addition, Viva Dolan creates calendars, posters, newsletter updates, campaign-based stationery and traveler materials. Each is stylistically different, but part of B&R's strategy for keeping its brand fresh and interesting. "People who know the brand will encounter a new marketing piece and say, 'That's so B&R,'" says Viva. At the same time, he hopes that prospective customers discovering B&R for the first time will say, "What a cool company; we should find out more." The brand message is the joy of discovery.