.travel – What is it going to mean for the travel industry? What is it going to mean to you? – Interview with Ronald N. Andruff, President & CEO, Tralliance Corporation
Dedicated to enabling travelers, and the travel/tourism trade, to more effectively locate precise travel information on the Internet, .travel (when it is made available in early 2004) will be an industry-sponsored, industry-restricted top-level domain space that will host travel-related content only. Ultimately, the intention of .travel is to facilitate/enhance commerce, however, by it’s design it will relieve the growing frustration of Net users throughout the world by enabling them to retrieve only the travel information that directly corresponds to their queries. This presentation is intended to provide the audience with an overview of this exciting, global travel industry initiative.
Click here for a '.travel' FAQ
The idea of “activity-based retrieval” (as opposed to text-based or “free word” retrieval) will help users hone in on the specific products, services, or information that they desire. The end result will be a travel industry directory that will allow for searches that expeditiously produce information that is explicitly bound to the query. For example the query—What is the name of the tour operator that offers submarine tours of the Titanic?— will return one link to the single tour operator that offers this service. Click here to learn more!
Open to all bona fide travel and tourism associations, TTPC is a consortium of travel industry bodies representing a broad cross-section of the industry. The actual size of the industry, from the perspective of directory subscribers and domain name holders, is estimated to be in excess of 1,000,000 travel providers, purveyors, and associated entities—a constituency comprised of travel agents, tour operators, airlines, hotels, car rental companies, cruise lines, bus companies, ferries, rail lines, theme parks, convention bureaus, and national tourism offices.
Tourism’s economic impact is four times as large as global steel exports, 50% larger than the export of clothes and textiles, and equal to the global export of automobiles. Underscoring these statistics, travel and tourism accounts for 5% of total global economic output, 10% of international trade and leads all online transactions at 28% of the total. Click here to learn more!
Ron Andruff is President & CEO, Tralliance Corporation, whose mission is to enhance Internet commerce for the travel and tourism industry. To effect the mission, Tralliance is combining a next-generation, Internet travel directory with the top-level domain name (TLD) .travel. Unlike ".com", ".org" or any of the other TLDs available on the Internet today, .travel – which will be an exclusive domain to the industry – will represent a clear and reliable space on the Internet where everyone, the world over, will know exactly what content they can expect to find there. Today, Mr. Andruff is going to give us an overview of this vital and imminent industry initiative.