No sooner had Tamy Emma Pépin sat down at Café Brume to answer our questions than she merrily announced that she’d found a great last-minute flight deal for New York. Departure in two days. With the flight booked, she posts the dates for her New York stay on social media. That’s Tamy Emma Pépin: a spontaneous, connected, and passionate traveller.
“Travel has always been important in my life. My mother [former MNA Fatima Houda-Pépin] is from Morocco. I’ve travelled with my parents from a very young age. I feel alive when I travel,” she says, her eyes sparkling.
She never takes travel guides with her. She makes decisions based on information she finds on social networks. “When I travel, I use my phone, I ask for recommendations on Facebook,” she says. “It’s such an enriching way of travelling!”
Her show, Tamy@Royaume-Uni (Tamy@UnitedKingdom), is the upshot of this new way of approaching travel. For two months, she explored England, Scotland, and Ireland, meeting in person with people she initially met on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. “I also used other applications such as Camp in my garden and Couch Surfing.”

Along with the show, Tamy web-published an interactive travel log in which she narrated her experience, recommended must-see spots, and shared playlists created on 8tracks. She also presented video portraits of people she met during the shoots.
With this initial TV experience under her belt, she was back the following year with a new concept: find creative and popular people in the U.S. on Instagram, contact them, and go and meet them. The result was #tamyUSA, a road trip on the west coast and in the southwest of the United States that found its way onto television and the web. “I decided to make #TamyUSA because I wanted to explore mobile photography,” says Tamy. “Photography is the most widespread means of sharing destinations, and it’s my favourite resource when I travel.”

She wears many hats on her projects: producer, director, researcher, and host. These talents have led her to create her own business called “Un peu plus loin,” an agency devoted to ideas, creativity, and content production, broadcasting, and distribtuion that is set to scale new heights.
Her media career really took off when the Sid Lee agency recruited her in 2008 to take part in the first 100% web campaign designed for Tourisme Montréal. “That’s when I became Miss Social Media. I was blogging, taking snaps, and shooting videos,” she recalls.
She expresses enormous respect for the digital realm and refuses to see the web as the place where TV B-roll goes to die. “I work because there are people who follow me on the web. What’s critical in my work is always to remember who I’m talking to on the various platforms and to deliver my best.”
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