2006: Coorda, the synergy people – from La Réunion to the world

After the years in the Bresse, I was drawn to the Indian Ocean. I lived on La Réunion for ten years – and from there grew what in 2006 called itself “Coorda International – The synergy people”. By then I had been working on the internet since 1994: at first without a company, because there was not even a register entry for this kind of work back then, and from 1996 as Netfacts.

A network across three continents

The website of 16 August 2006 shows how far it reached. The head office of Coorda™ Networks was in Manapany les Bains near Saint-Joseph, plus partners in Roubaix and in Provence, an office in Saint-Pierre, Coorda ABT Solutions in Kyiv, Coorda CityIT Solutions in Pune (India) and EPN-NET in Thailand. In the right-hand column, the group: Coorda Consulting, Coorda Networks, Inter Ocean Tours, Mascareignes Communications, RunAir Airbrokers, ABT Outsourcing and CityIT Solutions.

Our principle was right at the top: every partner is a specialist in their field – and the client still has only one contact on the spot who looks after the project from start to finish, even on small budgets. Kyiv, by the way, became a collaboration that lasts to this day.

You can see the era in the page: contact via Skype, Wengo and ICQ, a fax and a VoIP number, a visitor counter “depuis le 09-07-2004” – and bottom left “Coobox Pro 1.5b”: our own website builder, something like what you know today from Jimdo & Co. With it we built the pages of the group and of our clients.

Travel: ioTours

ioTours already existed in 2002, a registered trademark of the netfacts/coorda group. Under it we offered houseboat holidays in France – based in Tournus on the Saône –, active holidays on La Réunion and the islands of the Indian Ocean and, as an IATA agency, low-cost flights worldwide. From the Bresse to the volcano: one line.

Le Manacoël – our own place

In Manapany les Bains, 500 metres from the natural seawater pool, we had our own guesthouse: Le Manacoël. Five apartments, from a studio to a four-room flat, with a pool, barbecue area and tropical garden, Saint-Pierre 18 kilometres away. We helped our guests with hikes, dives, paragliding, rafting or helicopter flights in the wild south of the island. The Manacoël was a partner of the Guide Sésame and part of the Pays d’accueil Sud Sauvage.

The website – by Coorda Networks, of course – spoke German, French and English, showed a “picture of the day”, and the songs of Luc Donat played in the background. A short film from back then still exists: Le Manacoël on Dailymotion.

An aircraft carrier as a reef

And then there was the Clemenceau. The decommissioned French aircraft carrier was to be scrapped – instead, the Association Nautilus wanted to sink its hull, cleaned according to all the rules, in the bay of Saint-Paul, where the first settlers had come ashore in 1665: as an artificial reef, a breakwater and a giant aquarium for divers and glass-bottom boats, linked to a museum of the island’s maritime heritage. Coorda Networks was a sponsor, and we campaigned hard for it at the time. The Journal de l’Île reported on it again and again in 2006 and 2007.

The Clemenceau was never sunk; after a long odyssey she was scrapped from 2009 in Hartlepool, England. But the project shows how we thought back then: big, sustainable – and for the island.

What remains

Coorda Networks, Coorda Consulting, a guesthouse by the sea: much of what existed then can be found again today. The idea that specialists work together and the client still has a single contact lives on in coorda.com. And much of what I know about tourism comes from the Manacoël: welcoming guests, offering the region as an experience, building with nature rather than against it. That experience lives on today in aleae – sustainable, modular accommodation for Southern Europe.

The images come from the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine): ioTours of 25 January 2002, Coorda International of 16 August 2006, Nautilus of 9 September 2007, Le Manacoël of 14 December 2007.