Jay Tindall
Co-Founder & COO
Remote Lands is the culmination of co-founder and COO Jay Tindall’s diverse and accomplished 25-year career. Over the last quarter century, from video producer and editor, to digital media trailblazer and dot-com pioneer, to global entrepreneur, one constant of Jay’s industriousness has been travel.
This lifetime of traveling, which began with Jay’s first trip abroad as a teenager, is distinguished not only by its breadth – more than 60 countries and counting – but also by its depth. Many countries have stamped Jay’s passport 20 or more times over the years, and China, a particular area of expertise, has opened its doors to him an astounding 200 times. Moreover, the majority of this peripateticism has been for business, rather than leisure, with Jay jaunting far and wide to line up partners, negotiate contracts and close deals (and sometimes doing so amidst chaotic emerging markets of the developing world).
In Asia, Jay has not only touched down bearing a business visa; for more than 10 years, he has also made it his home. Initially it was Hong Kong in the 1990s, where he launched his first venture, a leading interactive media company. Today, it’s Bangkok, where he established and runs Remote Lands’ Asia office, which provides logistical coordination and up-to-the-minute support for the company’s clients both before and during their trips.
Jay’s travels within Asia are marked by a special passion for interacting with the people of remote tribal cultures in Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, China, and the Philippines, where he’s had many memorable experiences with local villagers. He has made multiple tourism reconnaissance missions to the “hermit kingdom” of North Korea and met royalty in India and Bhutan. Jay has also combed the continent to line up the best private jets and inspect the finest properties, including Amanresorts and Taj Hotel Resorts and Palaces, for Remote Lands clients.
Jay is also an avid photographer whose journalistic roots and keen eye behind the lens have captured many of Remote Lands’ signature images seen on this website. Many of his images have been selected for print publication as well.
In his career before co-founding Remote Lands, Jay often positioned himself in the vanguard of emerging technologies and markets. In the 1980s, he worked on the cutting edge of interactive CD-ROM development for major pharmaceutical companies, before pulling up stakes for Hong Kong to oversee product development – and set up a satellite office in Guangzhou, China – for a leading travel CD-ROM publisher. It was this fateful relocation that led his path to cross with that of Catherine Heald, Remote Lands’ co-founder and CEO.
In Hong Kong in 1994, Jay co-founded The Black Box, which quickly became a leading online media company. Among its clientele, The Black Box counted giants in the fields of computers, telecommunications, advertising, finance, media, and tourism – including such blue chips as Apple, AT&T, Intel, and MTV Asia – and was honored with a Hong Kong Small Business Award in 1997.
Jay’s next venture, Orientation.com, of which he was co-founder and COO, was not quite as small a business – by 2001, the multilingual Internet portal had 70 employees and local products in 35 countries and 17 languages. Red Herring named the company the “Yahoo of the Developing World,” while Deloitte Touche honored it among its prestigious “Silicon Alley Fast 50” corporations.
After Orientation, Jay’s next pursuit was an international IP telephone company that was very active in China, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, among other markets, gaining him further expertise in regions that would become favorite luxury travel destinations of Remote Lands’ clients.
Since co-founding the company in 2005, Jay has guided Remote Lands’ steady evolution into the world’s foremost ultra-luxe operator of private tours in Asia – a boutique travel designer that is consistently recognized by such publications as Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure and National Geographic Traveler and poised for impressive growth in the years to come.