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About Ben Grummels, Aitutaki Cook Islands

The Aitutakian at heart behind this website — ten years running Aitutaki's largest watersports company, now a Perth-based SEO consultant keeping this Aitutaki guide first-hand and up to date.

Young Ben Grummels spear-fishing on a motu at the Aitutaki lagoon

Where it started

From Science teacher to SEO/GEO specialist

Long before this website existed, I was living the version of Aitutaki it describes. In the 1980s I owned and managed the largest watersports company on the island: a small fleet of sailing yachts, a game fishing boat, and a car, all built around getting visitors safely onto the most beautiful lagoon in the South Pacific. I climbed coconut trees for fresh juice, skippered day trips to Maina, One Foot Island and other motus, and worked out — the hard way, over many seasons on the water — exactly which beaches, reef passages and wind directions actually deliver the picture-postcard Aitutaki everyone hopes to find.

That hands-on decade is still the backbone of the practical, first-hand advice you'll find across this site, from lagoon cruise tips to notes on where snorkelling visibility is best depending on the wind direction.

Marketing before Google

Running a tourism business on a remote island of 1,800 people taught me that a great product is only half the job — people also need to hear about it. Long before search engines existed, I hosted familiarisation trips for hospitality executives, government figures and travel writers, including Tony Wheeler, co-founder of the Lonely Planet guidebooks. I also landed an International Game Fishing Association world-record catch fishing, standing on the Aitutaki reef near Maina, and helped keep hula dancing and Island Night traditions alive by giving Aitutakian performers steady tourist audiences.

Still hands-on

Why This Site Still Matters

That grounding in tourism and promotion is why this Aitutaki website still gets maintained rather than left to go stale like so many travel sites. I still moderate a 15,000-plus member Aitutaki Facebook community, I still hear from people who've recently travelled there, and I still update pages like Things to Do, Travel to Aitutaki, Villages of Aitutaki and Property & Land Aitutaki whenever local details change. If you've read the tide-and-wind notes on the homepage about lagoon snorkelling visibility, that's a direct product of years spent reading Aitutaki's weather from the deck of a boat, not something summarised from a brochure.

New Jerusalem village of thatched huts, Aitutaki, 1980s

Building an industry

Growing Aitutaki's Tourism Economy

Growing Aitutaki's tourism economy in the 1980s meant working alongside a small, close-knit team — boat crew, fishing guides and hospitality staff who became lifelong friends, several of whom are pictured further down this page. Aitutaki's shift from a mostly subsistence agricultural economy toward a hospitality-led one didn't happen by accident; it took local families, small operators and a fair bit of persistence to convince the wider world that a lagoon this good was worth the flight. Watching that transformation up close, and playing a part in it, shaped how I still think about destination marketing today.

Faces and places from those years

Aerial view of the Aitutaki lagoon and barrier reef — The Aitutaki lagoon that started it all.

Ben Grummels with a watersports crewmate on Aitutaki — With frequent Aitutaki sailor and fun dear friend PM David Langey, ONZ (IM).

Aitutaki watersports and hospitality staff group photo, 1982 — Araura College staff photo, 1982.

Ben Grummels training oil industry technicians in Doha, Qatar for QatarEnergy

After Aitutaki

Self-Taught, Twice Over

After ten years on Aitutaki I returned to Western Australia, though the island never really left. I'd already picked up an unusual grounding in technology along the way — including 4 years working as Senior Technician in the department of Minerals Engineering and Extractive Metallurgy at Curtin University's, Western Australian School of Mines (WASM). After that: training oil-industry technicians in Doha, Qatar, and building one of the first websites in the remote Kimberley region while managing a TAFE centre there in the mid-1990s, at a time when working out why early search engines ranked some pages above others meant teaching myself from scratch. That self-taught curiosity turned into a full-time SEO / GEO and digital marketing career in Perth, running as an SEO consultant in Perth and SouthEast Asia since 1999 by helping small and medium businesses get found online. Eg 6 star beach hotels in Bali have rolled out the red carpet for my family for a week in exchange for one our of my digital marketing consulting time in their boardroom with GMs and all their resort executives to improve their revPAR.

Ben Grummels holding a coconut at Aitutaki lagoon beside a surfer at Scarborough Beach, Perth

Two beaches, one life

Life Today in Perth

These days I split my time between Perth's northern beaches — I still surf regularly at Trigg Point — and SEO work for a range of local clients, listed below. I keep this Aitutaki site running as a labour of love and a genuine public resource, not a commercial venture: there's no advertising sold on these pages, just an old islander's attempt to keep good, accurate information about Aitutaki easy to find.

A handful of photos from those years are scattered through this page: the watersports and hospitality crew who made the business run, a training trip to Doha, and the beach life that's followed me ever since — Aitutaki's lagoon on one side of the world, Trigg Point/Scarborough's surfing photos on the other. None of them are stock photography. If a photo appears on this site, there's a good chance I took it, appeared in it, or knew everyone standing in frame.

Ben Grummels today, Perth Western Australia

Why trust this page

Why does any of this matter to someone planning an Aitutaki holiday? Search engines, and increasingly AI answer engines, are built to reward information written by someone who actually knows a place, not content stitched together from other websites. Ten years living on Aitutaki, running tourism operations there, and staying closely connected to the island since, is the reason this site can tell you which side of the lagoon clears up first after a blow, rather than repeating generic tropical-island copy. That's the whole point of publishing an About page like this one — so you know exactly whose first-hand experience you're reading.

If you'd like to see more of my Perth-based SEO work, visit SEO Expert Perth, or connect on Facebook and LinkedIn. For everything Aitutaki, the Aitutaki Home page is the best place to start planning a visit.

Some of my Perth SEO & digital marketing clients

Below is a working list of some current SEO and digital marketing clients based in Western Australia, spanning trades, medical, financial, professional and hospitality businesses. Supporting them is what pays the bills that keep this Aitutaki site free, ad-light and online.