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

Tralliance Corporation, established in 2001 and headquartered in New York City, is establishing the definitive travel directory – a comprehensive library of information about travel, tourism, or travel-related products or services – to effectively and efficiently match buyers to sellers. The precise indexing and cataloguing of products and services will relieve travel consumers’ frustration in locating the greatest value, or most tailored, travel offering.

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!

The Travel Partnership Corporation (TTPC), a non-profit corporation, has been formed to promote the addition to the Internet of a new sponsored top-level domain (sTLD) to be known as .travel; and, to recommend policies and practices concerning the administration of the registered domain names in the .travel sTLD.

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!

Ronald N. Andruff, President & CEO, Tralliance Corporation - Mr. Andruff's 25-year career in the international marketing arena provides him with the understanding and requisite skill sets necessary to develop forward-thinking strategies in a technology driven marketplace. In 1998, Mr. Andruff became immersed in the travel industry when he co-founded a company that was the first business-to-trade travel portal that empowered travel agents to harness the Internet to provide their clients with the lowest available fares. A former champion professional athlete, Mr. Andruff strongly believes that the success of any endeavor comes as a result of all affected parties seeing – and sharing – a singular vision.

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.

About the ONHTEC Exhibition - ONHTEC®, a co-production by Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals® and Hsyndicate, aims to become the most comprehensive and trendsetting online conference & showcase of hospitality IT & distribution technology available on the web. Starting from October 2002, ONHTEC ® will provide quarterly scheduled online conferences geared around pertinent trends in hospitality technology. ONHTEC ® aims to provide knowledge & know-how to industry professionals at all levels of expertise. For more information about the conference, please go to the ONHTEC web site at . For more information about the exposition, please contact Lance Peterson at [email protected] or (512) 249-5333 x20.

Kevin Heilbronner is the US Editor for wiredhotelier.com and hospitalitynet.org, providing streaming multimedia-content for these websites. Based outside of Washington DC, Heilbronner has worked with Hsyndicate to conduct interviews at several hospitality trade shows in the US and Europe over the last couple of years. His column and content are featured in the Hospitality Net weekly newsletter. A familiar voice in Washington, DC, Heilbronner is the stadium announcer for the NBA's Washington Wizards, WNBA's Washington Mystics and WUSA's Washington Freedom. He resides in Centreville, VA and can be reached via email: [email protected].