Travel Industry

YTB, the travel agency that has been accused of running a multi-leveling marketing pyramid scheme, won’t have to appear in an Illinois courtroom in the near future.

That’s not to say it’s off the hook for the labels — just that the former YTB referring agents, as they’re known internally,  haven’t done a good job of explaining their position. U.S. District Court Judge G. Patrick Murphy declared the complaint paperwork from the group action  “a good deal of flabbiness in the sprawling pleading before the court consists of paragraphs of legal argument challenging the courts earlier dismissal of the ICFA claim of the non-Illinois plaintiffs.”

Had he himself been more pithy, that would read, “I’ve already told you that non-residents can’t file in this lawsuit.”

This same judge, however, did tell an Illini gentleman who filed a case in June that his original complaint wasn’t the U.S. District Court for Southern Illinois’ venue, but he could refile if he shows how the gripe “implicates consumer protection concerns.” So the show could go on.

2009 not smooth sailing for YTB

Meanwhile, YTB is settling a similar lawsuit brought by the attorney general in California.

Yet the outcome in any courtroom shouldn’t matter to a hill of beans. For starters, if the travel industry deems that it has a rogue player in its midst, the other players certainly have the strength to shut it down. Take, for instance, the Cruise Line International Association (CLIA), which implemented tougher standards to join and attain accreditation this year. Pure MLM recruiters don’t have time to earn no stinkin’ badges. And as more suppliers demand a CLIA or IATA card to claim a discounted price on tours, this forces folks to either get educated in the field or scrub the perks.

MLM recruiters are big on perks.

Some suppliers, like Royal Caribbean Cruise Line and Norwegian Cruise Line, simply refuse to accept bookings from YTB agents. This, of course, forces the serious travel agents to move to host agencies that are in good standing. And never underestimate the power of snubbing: A common observation among YTB agents is that they are treated with disdain when they call suppliers for quotes and questions. It may be high schoolish, but it did work then and continues to work now.

Finally, there is a third leg of this stool known as personal responsibility. Anyone who forks over money to buy a YTB franchise today and claims they were duped can’t spell YTB at Google. The accusations, complaints and earnings reports are extremely visible. They’re currently selling stock at .12 a share, according to Motley Fool — yet another pithy remark from someone in authority.

Photography: Nattu

EyeforTravel has lined up some heavy-hitters for the Travel Distribution Summit to be held Sept 16-17, 2009 in Chicago, at the Westin.

EyeforTravel Travel Distribution Summit

It’s a great opportunity to meet and network with over 700 top executives from online travel suppliers and distributors including Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline, STA Travel, Google, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Hilton Hotels Corp., Continental, Jetblue, American Airlines and many more.

But the thing that sets apart this event is that EyeforTravel has managed to fill in 2 days of panels and presentations with some genuinely hot topics being discussed and debated by the aforementioned heavyweights and trend-setters.

Day One starts with a panel on the balance of power between OTA’s and suppliers, with Jeff Davidoff, CMO, Orbitz; Matthew Crummack, SVP Lodging, Expedia; and Julie Atkinson, Sr. Director Global Online Sales and Distribution, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide.

This discussion is a big deal and a hot subject right now, given the OTA price wars and the steep recession-influenced discounts that suppliers are offering on their own websites.

Day Two’s highlight is the panel on ‘Innovations in Search.’  Speakers for this panel include Ted Souder, Head of Travel – Central Region, Google; Anne Payne, CEO, BeDynamic; and Yen Lee, President, Uptake.

Semantic Web

You’ll learn about preparing for the Semantic web, and the website changes needed to ensure optimized results in semantic search. 

You’ll learn how to build a keyword list that’s based on consumer behaviour and purchasing habits. Find out how Google actually sees your site, how to engage customers on your websites for the best conversion rates, how to accurately measure ROI, and get the lowdown on mobile search and geosearch.

In addition, the Travel Distribution Summit offers a host of speakers sharing their expertise and forecasts for crucial distribution trends, finding value in the new economy, deploying social media to improve distribution, the links between online trip-planning tools and offline distribution, benefits of meta-search for suppliers, ancilliary revenue strategies and the increasing importance and changing landscape in the vacation rental market.

To make it even more attractive, EyeforTravel has scheduled two more conferences on ‘Revenue Management and Pricing’ and ‘Mobile Strategies for Travel.’ One pass gives you unlimited access to all three conferences.

Plus, if you’re planning on staying at the Westin, you can get a special EyeforTravel discount. For flight discounts, go to www.jetblue.com/promo and enter promotional code ‘EyeforTravel’.  This discount is valid for outbound flights Sept 13-15, 2009 and return flights Sept 17-19, 2009.

by Barbara Weibel at Hole In The Donut Travels

Trazzler, the travel destination website that recommends trips unique to a user’s location and travel personality, recently announced their biggest contest to date, the #NYCGO Writing Contest. In cooperation with nycgo, the official source of daily information about all there is to do and see in New York City, Trazzler invites travel writers to describe “a place that not only satisfies your thirst for a change of scenery, but goes beyond this, breaking the spell of everyday existence and providing the refuge, relief, or pleasant contrast that we all crave, especially in the summer”

The grand prize is a $10,000 contract to be a writer-in-residence for two weeks in New York City. The winner will be paid to write 30 Trazzler trips covering the five boroughs of NYC. Hotel accommodations (14 nights) and round-trip airfare will provided by co-sponsors AKA luxury hotel residences and JetBlue. Additionally, each of nine runners-up will be awarded $250 contracts to write ten Trazzler trips and four editors’ choice winners will receive $500 contracts to write 15 Trazzler trips.

The “Oasis” theme of the contest leaves the subject matter open to interpretation. An oasis could be an urban park, a gourmet meal, a swimming hole on a hot summer day, a romantic hideaway, a museum… really any place of extreme beauty, culture, flavor, respite, or relaxation.

Dates:
* Contest submission start date: Wednesday, July 22, 2009, 12 noon EDT
* Contest submission end date: Monday, August 17, 2009, 11:59 am EDT
* Judging period begins: Monday, August 17, 2009, 12 noon EDT
* Judging period ends: Monday, August 31, 2009, 11:59 am EDT

How to Enter:
* 1. Sign up for Trazzler (be sure to provide a valid email address, even if you use Facebook Connect)
* 2. Submit your entry by clicking on “Write a Trip” and filling out the required fields
* 3. Click the “Trazzler #NYCGO Contest Entry” checkbox at the bottom of the “Write a Trip” page
* 4. After your trip is posted, you will be invited to share your trip on Twitter and Facebook
* If you have questions or problems, contact the Trazzler team in the help forum

Any entry displaying the text “Trazzler #NYCGO Contest Semifinalist” immediately following the trip description on or before Monday, August 31, 2009 is a semifinalist and cawill automatically be entered in round two. The 10 trips that are wishlisted the most by the greater Trazzler community between Monday, August 31, 2009 (12 noon EDT) and Monday, September 14, 2009 (11:59 am EDT) will pass to round three. Winners will be announced during the week of Monday, September 21, 2009.

The U.S. Green Building Council, The American Society of Interior Designers (ASID), and The Hospitality Industry Network (NEWH) are sponsoring the Sustainable Suite Design Competition to help drive green design practices within the hotel industry.

Sustainable Suite Design Competition

The winning design will be built as a model guest room to be presented as an educational display for the design industry, hotel owners and brands, and corporate travel executives.

Additionally the winning team and design will be profiled in Hospitality Design, ASID ICON, and the NEWH Magazine. The Sustainable Suite will be unveiled at HDExpo in Las Vegas in May 2010.

There’s also a ‘Students & Young Professionals’ award, and the winners of this award too will be mentioned along with the ‘Professional’ award in all the aforementioned magazines, but their design will not be built out.

The judges for the competition include Helen Jorgensen, Sr. Director of Purchasing, Host Hotels & Resorts; David Mahood is the V.P. Sustainability, NEWH; Carlie Bullock-Jones, ASID, LEED AP, Sustainable Design Consultant with Ecoworks Studio in Atlanta; Eileen Slora, Executive Director, Interior Design for Fairmont Hotels and Resorts; Linda Sorrento, Senior Director of Education, USGBC; and Annette K. Stelmack, founder of Inspirit-llc and a ‘green design guru.’

Last date for entries is Aug 31, 2009, and the judging will be completed by Oct 1, 2009. You can download the application form here, and these are the FAQs for the competition.

The Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas is placing a massive bet on the successful opening of the 490-room Paradise Tower expansion. And surprisingly enough, it looks like their gamble might just pay off.

Hard Rock Hotel, Las Vegas

Paradise Tower is all set for an official opening this week, but most of the rooms are already open for business.

The 490 room Paradise Tower, which has been designed to attract corporate travelers, is part of a massive $760 million expansion project, and will be followed by the December opening of the Harmon Tower, which adds casino space and 375 more suites to the resort.

As part of the expansion project, the Hard Rock has already re-opened their expanded concert venue called ‘The Joint’ in April, along with an addition of 60,000 sq ft of convention and meeting space.

And here’s the kicker – The Hard Rock Hotel’s 1300 rooms have clocked in an impressive 95% occupancy throughout this month, are sold out for the next weekend, and near capacity for the next few weekends.

The sold-out weekends can be attributed to the Hard Rock’s Sunday pool parties at it’s popular beach club ‘Rehab.’ But the surprising thing is that the Hard Rock has managed to keep the meter ticking Sunday thru Thursday.

The Hotel attributes this success to the new concert venue and the additional meeting space, which they say has helped them attract more conventions and meetings business during weekdays. This success could quite possibly be helped along some more with the opening of the business friendly Paradise Tower.

And in the next stage in December - the Hard Rock is targeting casino-goers with 35,000 sq ft of additional casino space to add to the existing 30,000 sq ft. Plus the Harmon Tower which has some neat touches for the casino crowd - like a separate check-in desk.

Just the fact that they managed to get all this done in the middle of a downturn, plus the launch timing – just ahead of MGM’s massive 6000 room CityCenter project, mean that the Hard Rock’s expansion is already a partial success. And they’re going to need it, to satisfy the lenders who coughed up $760 million.

The Hard Rock Hotel & Casino was acquired by Morgans Hotel Group for $770 million in 2007. The current expansion is funded by a $620 million loan taken on by a joint venture between Morgans Hotel Group and DLJ Merchant Banking Partners.

Photo by Michael180 via wikipedia (creative commons).

United takes a drubbing

It must be tough to wake up each morning these days and realize your name is Glenn Tilton and you have to report to work as president and CEO of United Airlines these days.

On the B2B side, you’re under attack from associations and now Congress for your attempt to scrub credit card merchant fees. On the consumer front, a band called Sons of Maxwell has pulled 4.2 million hits on its YouTube video titled “United Breaks Guitars.” Even worse, people are humming the tune that goes with “I should have flown with someone else or gone by car, because United breaks guitars.” Dave Carroll is promising two more songs about his gripe, despite the fact the airline did step up and offer compensation after a year of denials.

Swell. The first one is now selling on iTunes for .99.

Here’s how a few social media experts would advise Mr. Tilton to turn this thing around:

The airline apparently thought it was responding in good humor by saying it intended to use Carroll’s video to train its employees. Not a bad concept, but tin-eared in execution, is Kathryn Hammer’s take.. “Great, break the guy’s pricy guitar, refuse to pay for it, ignore and stonewall the issue for a year, then, when you’re finally called out on it on the national stage, announce you’re helping yourself to his intellectual property. Wince.” Her strategy: Hire Carroll to make the training video along with the CEO and customer service leadership on camera. Pay the songwriter handsomely. It could even go so far as to hire him to do a series of short music videos for the United website, highlighting particular promotions and services, each beginning with, “Hi, I’m Dave Carroll, and United makes me sing.”

Broken guitars = United

For that matter, make Tilton sing about how sorry he is, says Les McKeown, CEO of Predictable Success. If he is tone-deaf, all the better.

Donnetta Campbell would start with a YouTube video announcing a new foundation that gives guitars to underprivileged kids (really do it, she adds) and donate a bunch to pay a penance for the damage. Film the kids with their new guitars and lessons.

In that same vein, Matthew Broder, the communications wizard at Pitney Bowes, suggests a “bands fly free” promotion to established bands that can prove they are traveling to a paid gig. He’d even hire local musicians to set up a jam session at the select United gates.

When bad news goes viral like this, if a company doesn’t respond in the same channels, the audience is left with a negative opinion, points out Carol Warren, a principal at Antarra Communications. If this were her client, she would have already created a song about how United will fix the problem, making sure to poke fun of themselves. Nor would she stop there: regional Twitter email campaigns could clue people in on the best local places to hear music for upcoming flight destinations. She’d run a sweepstakes for folks to post regional music and food tips on Facebook — best tips win free air tickets based on the feedback.

Lots of opportunity

Mario Almonte, the managing partner at Herman and Almonte PR, takes the opposite approach: “The United Breaks Guitar video is too catchy to be taken seriously.  Airlines have always been notorious for losing baggage and destroying their content.  United’s problem is not PR but its business practices,” he says. “ Riders don’t care about United’s business practice.  They only care about their own personal experience.  Give them a good deal and they’ll accept a little bad service.” If the airlines really want to fight fire with fire, they should put out a humorous video showing how annoying and inconsiderate musicians can be on their flights — e.g. taking up an entire overhead bin with their equipment, getting drunk and hitting on the flight attendants.

But no matter the tactic, funny seems to be United’s way out of this mess. After all, as David Moye, the media relations manager at Alternative Strategies, points out, “Explaining their business decisions in a fun way will get the support of consumers, who will forgive anything that’s funny. Think Richard Nixon saying, ‘Sock it to me.’”

Photography: tawalker, fictures, jsome1

Hotels.com has lost another round in it’s bid to register Hotels.com as a trademark, after the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board’s decision to refuse the registration on the ground that the mark is a ‘generic term’ for hotel information and reservations.

Hotels.com

This decision by the Appeals Court, handed down on July 23, 2009, to affirm the TTAB’s conclusions, effectively makes it very much more difficult to trademark generic terms.

Hotels.com had argued that it does not provide lodging and meals for its users and is not synonymous with the word “hotel”. 

They cited survey evidence as establishing that Hotels.com is widely associated with the company, and is not viewed as a generic term or common name for hotel services. 76% of consumers in the survey responded that they view Hotels.com as a brand name, and not as a generic term.

Hotels.com also clarified that it is not a generic term for a hotel, but is used to indicate an information source and travel agency, and that the mark, viewed in its entirety (with the .com), is not a generic name but an indicator of their services. 

They pointed out that the context in which a term is used is evidence of how the term is perceived by prospective customers, and that the dot-com domain name is a significant aspect of the context of Hotels.com, negating the genericness finding.

All of this comes across as a pretty convincing argument. But unfortunately for them, the TTAB and the Courts say that registrability does not depend on the .com combination.

The TTAB went one step further, and hauled in other websites which include the term ‘hotels’ in their domain name into the argument , including www.all-hotels.com, www.web-hotels.com and www.my-discount-hotels.com.

Citing these websites as evidence, the TTAB said that it “demonstrates a competitive need for others to use as part of their own domain names and trademarks, the term that applicant is attempting to register.”

Seems they’ve been down this road before, and the Appeals Court also had all the answers ready. They cited the case of Lawyers.com as an example. Figures that a site for lawyers would be the first to make a hash of it for everyone who follows.

US House Representatives from Florida and Nevada have asked for an investigation to find out whether a travel blacklist bans government agencies from holding meetings in certain leisure-oriented and holiday resort cities.

Rayburn Building - U.S. House of Representatives

The letter asking for an investigation, signed by five lawmakers from Florida and three from Nevada, was sent to the U.S. Government Accountability office.

It says that “We write to you to request that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) undertake a review of the policies and practices that federal agencies, including the Department of Justice and the General Services Administration, use to determine city locations for convening meetings, seminars and conferences within the United States.”

The letter goes on to ask for information about written or unwritten orders that direct agency personnel to avoid meetings and conferences in specific U.S. cities, along with an analysis of the request for proposals issued and proposals accepted by each agency – which would help determine if any U.S. city is being purposely excluded.  

To add to this, Senator Ben Nelson (D-FL) is planning to introduce legislation which would forbid federal agencies from blacklisting any U.S. destination from their travel plans.

All this activity comes after Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-NV) exchange of letters on this subject with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. The media exposure and pressure from Congress could push the Obama Administration into issuing some kind of specific directive to all federal agencies making it clear that cities like Las Vegas and Orlando are not off the table.

That should be a relief to federal employees who were probably resigned to never again enjoying the guilty pleasures and attractions in Las Vegas.

The 8 lawmakers who sent the letter asking for an investigation of the travel blacklist are Suzanne Kosmas,  Dina Titus, Corrine Brown, John Mica, Alan Grayson, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Shelley Berkley and Dean Heller.

Rep Alan Grayson (D-FL) has been especially supportive of the travel and tourism sectors, and recently introduced the Paid Vacation Act in Congress, which aims to make employers offer mandatory paid vacations.

Photo by cliff1006 via flickr (creative commons).

Whose responsibility?

Thanks in large part to Congress’ attention, United Airlines has delayed its deadline to cut 28 travel agencies off its credit card merchant account. Sure, the airline felt the pressure from associations to knock it off, but the signed letter from 13 elected politicians no doubt was the final piece of baggage thrown onto this cart.

Rep. Michael Arcuri (D-N.Y.)  told the press in a teleconference earlier this week that he’s not buying United’s argument that this was a cost-saving initiative limited in scope, because the savings would be too small to be worth the effort. When the numbers don’t add up, suspicion swoops in.

And lawmakers were quick to warn United that it really wants to fly right when it comes to the Fair Credit Billing Act.

But that’s not to say the issue is resolved. United has only gone as far as to say these agencies on the chopping block — one allegedly directs $500,000 in ticket sales to UA every year — may ask for a 60-day extension to get their affairs in order. The company continues to swear this is not a pilot program in a more sinister plan to eliminate travel agents from its business plan.

“Finally, this action neither violates nor undermines the Fair Credit Billing Act,” Jeff Foland, United’s senior vice president of worldwide sales and distribution, wrote in a press release. “There will be no difference in how credit card disputes will be handled from a customer’s perspective. Customers who charge their tickets with travel agents will have the same rights they have always had, including the right to dispute charges to their card issuer for non-performed services. This is the case when the impacted travel agents use United’s merchant account; it will continue to be the case when the impacted agents use their own merchant accounts.”

Mass exodus?

The trouble is, the new policy doesn’t break the ARC sales terms, either, as some industry pundits thought early on, officials at the technology solutions company are saying.

So it’s shaping up to become more a battle of wills: can the travel industry kick up enough dust to get United to slink away from this notion or will an airline desperate for cash damn the brownie points and forge ahead with any penny-saving measure it finds? I’m in agreement with Kevin Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition, who is fond these days of bringing up the backlash Northwest Airlines dealt with when it tried to slap a $7.50 surcharge on any tickets the public buys through an agent. Obviously, that went over like a lead balloon in 2004, and according to Mitchell, it took months to rebuild the business that stunt cost the airline.

Today, NW has been eaten by Delta Airlines. Just sayin’.

Photography: stevendamron, marceatsworld

Virgin Australia is running a quirky promo contest called 4320LA, where you stand to win 3 round-the-world tickets on Virgin Atlantic and V Australia.

V Australia 4320LA contest

All you have to do is spend three days checking out the attractions in Los Angeles. And send in a tweet once every minute…

That’s 4320 tweets in the same number of minutes. Thankfully, the contest involves three people, so you and two friends can divvy up the tweets amongst yourselves.

Way it works is that the winning group gets a free trip to Los Angeles, where they have to prove their extreme twitter endurance. If successful, the winning trio then gets the 3 round-the-world tickets.

Virgin says that the campaign was inspired by trends showing Australians continue to travel overseas but are increasingly value conscious and keen to cram in as much action and activities into shorter breaks.

V Australia, in partnership with Nova Radio, has already kicked off the first round of this contest, and the three winners – Kelvin Yap (24), Nathan Hackett (25) and Matt Hodges (24) - are in LA July 21-23, tweeting away at a rate of 1 tweet/min.

Apparently, sending in a tweet a minute isn’t hard enough for them, so they’ve decided to also pose with one new person every single minute in LA. You can see the tweets and pictures and follow along here – www.4320la.com and @4320LA.

The second half of the contest is scheduled for August, so you might want to start following that twitter account if you want to take a shot at it in the next round. Especially if you’re in Sydney.