And if I introduced myself

While you're wandering around this blog, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce ourselves and tell you a bit of our story.

My name is Sébastien Leidgens, and I'm the founder of Let's Go My Love. I'm 40 years old, I'm a Belgian entrepreneur and I now live between Liège, Brussels and Paris.

We're a young team whose mission is to find the most beautiful places for a romantic getaway.

Let's Go My Love is a bit like a precious address book discovered by chance in an old attic. You open it and discover addresses carefully annotated over years of travel and exploration. Who wrote it? A mystery... But that's the idea.

The blog is already home to over 350 exceptional addresses in a rare collection. It could be a secret hotel, an unusual dwelling or a cabin in the woods, for example.

We spend 90% of our time choosing and describing quality places. Once published, the place is reviewed and updated several times a year. We travel about 4 months a year and give lots of advice.

A little background... In July 2020, I aspire to launch a new project in the world of travel, but which one?

At that time, I'm working as Digital Marketing Director for the French industrial company Re-uz, which specializes in reusables. Re-uz was, for example, the official supplier of reusables to the Olympic Games in Paris.

Prior to this, I was also involved in the development of the Brussels-based luxury travel agency Little Guest, which selects the finest hotels for families.

In the following weeks, I put down on paper the following idea: to create a quality romantic collection. And I came up with an editorial line: places run by passionate people, with a romantic atmosphere and a real personality, a bit like a book or a painting.

Today, 3 of us work on the site (a team that's part Belgian, part French and part German) and we collaborate with several freelancers on a weekly basis.

The thing we're most pleased about: visitors are very engaged with the site, remember the name and come back later. And frankly, that's no easy feat when you consider the competition in tourism. We can't wait to see what the future holds.

The logo has several meanings: it symbolizes the L for Let's Go My Love and the 2 for the couple. It's also half of a heart, and the font used to draw the logo is... Holiday!

No, I've been launching projects since I was 20 and I'm now 40! Among the projects that have influenced Let's Go My Love, there's first of all Qui Connaît un bon, launched in 2015. It was a recommendation system that was hugely successful in Europe. The idea was to ask people in a town a question: who knows a good baker? Who knows a good doctor? And word-of-mouth provided the relevant answers. The other project that influenced me was Little Guest, a collection of luxury hotels for families. I took part in the development of the project and had the opportunity to combine my passion for digital with another passion: tourism. Today, it's a great success all over the world, with a team of around thirty employees.

Basically, we try to choose places that have personality and leave lasting memories. We've noticed that couples are often looking for a unique experience that's different from the last one. Here are a few questions we ask ourselves every time:

- Does the venue have a personality all its own?
- Does it have wellness facilities such as a Jacuzzi?
- Does the venue garner rave reviews online?
- Is the venue suitable for celebrating a special occasion?
- Is the atmosphere romantic?
- Is the venue still a bit of a secret?
- Is the price reasonable or justified?
- Does the venue tell a story, like a book or a painting?
- Does the venue stimulate the imagination?

We limit the number of venues per geographical area to offer a real label of quality.

Historically, Romanticism wasn't all rose petals and hearts. Here's Wikipedia's definition:

"A movement that emerged at the end of the 18th century, characterized by the artist's desire to explore all the possibilities of art in order to express his state of mind. It was a reaction of sentiment against reason, exalting the mysterious and the fantastic and seeking escape and rapture in dreams, nature and the sublime, the exotic and the past, the ideal or the nightmare of a passionate sensibility."

Today, Let's Go My Love is part of this movement. But, one thing leading to another, we've added a second dimension: the bohemian aspect. This time, it's a 19th-century artistic movement, on the bangs of the more aristocratic Romanticism. It's both a lifestyle that rejects bourgeois domination in the context of industrial society and, at the same time, seeks an artistic ideal.

If we wanted to schematize, we could say that we're constantly trying to strike a balance between more luxurious venues (traditional romanticism) and more unusual venues that are part of the bohemian movement. We want to offer something for every budget. Diversity is key for us.

We thought about it at first. But today, it's something we want to avoid. We prefer sustainable growth and total independence. We started the project with my savings and that was it. Today, we're slowly making a living from it. The advantage is that when you move slowly, you're less likely to take a wrong turn and, above all, you can keep the level of fine-tuning at a maximum.