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.travel Debacle Desparately Seeking Sponsorships

August 22nd, 2006 · No Comments · Destination Marketing, News

Hello! All you travelers and tourism people did you know that there is a new “top level domain” called .travel? Ha ha, what a joke. Back sometime last year we began getting communication through one of our trade memberships (American Bus Association) about pre-qualifying for the upcoming registration of the soon to be available .travel domain. The whole affair has been one big f*^&*%*$ joke. First you have to jump through lame hoops with some lady at the Bus assoc who vets your potential domain names to see if you are eligible. Criteria? I won’t even begin to bore you with the lameness that is ABA and their so-called pre-qualification criteria.

Since we registered a handful of .travel domains, at an inflated cost through their monopolized system, I have largely forgotten they even existed. Heck, I can’t even remember what I registered. I think I have them redirecting to our main site, but my referal stats have never proven that to be even remotely useful. Today I got this email (I’ve been receiving many ‘reminders’ to register more domains):

Dear .travel Partner,

My name is Michael De Prado and I am the President of Worldwide Sales for theglobe.com (OTCBB:tglo), the parent company of Tralliance the new .travel registry and our new travel portal www.search.travel. As an online research tool, www.search.travel delivers qualified search results from the entire World Wide Web, giving priority to destinations and businesses that have registered a .travel domain name (only entities in the travel industry can secure .travel domain names). By using www.search.travel, consumers can now find all things travel related while saving valuable time and gaining peace of mind, because priority placement is given to “.travel authenticated” registrants, eliminating the need for consumers to sift through pages of irrelevant results or visit web sites that may not be reputable.

The .travel registry is a brand new internet top level domain. It is sponsored and supported globally with more than 200 travel associations. Our efforts to date have been focused on the Travel industry providers and suppliers. Some examples of industry players that have secured their .travel domain names are www.utah.travel, www.disney.travel, and www.texas.travel to name a few. We are now embarking on a major national consumer awareness campaign.

The purpose for us contacting you and your organization is to announce our consumer awareness campaign designated to reach TV and internet travel related segments, and to offer you some unique marketing and promotional opportunities. Our national campaign launched August 15, 2006 and will reach over 32,000,000 households with 96,000,000 National viewers along with over 10,000,000 unique web visitors during our campaign launch. Our TV commercial introduces www.search.travel as a new all encompassing travel portal, airing nationally over such major cable networks such as CNBC, MSNBC, Travel Channel & Weather Channel.

We are looking for intermediate monthly sponsorships starting at $25,000 and anchor sponsorships starting at $250,000. All the sponsorships shall also have a first right of refusal in the event you would wish to extend the sponsorship. The intermediate sponsorship shall include your brand on a specific destination tab for each of the states on www.search.travel, the anchor sponsorship shall be co-marketed on all of the nationally aired TV spots, along with placement on each of those 10,000,000 unique web clicks and placement on www.search.travel.

You can review our planned television commercials and campaign details at the following link.
http://www.travel.travel/media.htm

We would like to coordinate a call or meeting with you sometime in the next week or two to discuss how you can leverage our consumer awareness campaign that we have secured for www.search.travel. Once again, our launch has already started, and we would like your participation. Please contact us via email at advertising@tralliance.travel for any advertising inquiries. Thank you once again for your interest and support of the .travel sponsored domain.

Sincerely,

Michael

Michael A. De Prado
President- Worldwide Sales & Marketing
TheGlobe.com Inc. / Tralliance / Tglo (OTCBB: TGLO)
110 E. Broward Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301

Ph: (954) 461-8686
email: mdeprado@corp.theglobe.com
web: www.travel.travel
web: www.search.travel

Check out TheGlobe.com Inc. blah blah’s stock history. Using SEOmoz‘s most excellent Page Strength tool, we see that their search page barely squeaks out a 0.5 out of 10. A Big Fat Zero on the Socialmeter. It’s kind of cool to think I might be the only one in the entire world talking about this. Now add the fact that our domain registration cost us about $100 per domain/year because we had to go through their monopolized system and you see why I am slightly amused/annoyed by this email. It reeks of desperation.

In case you didn’t know:

Our national campaign launched August 15, 2006 and will reach over 32,000,000 households with 96,000,000 National viewers along with over 10,000,000 unique web visitors during our campaign launch.

I call BS. It’s been a week and I haven’t heard anything about this, now this lame plea for more CASH. Somebody should investigate this. Using their search, I do not find any of the .travel domains that I have registered. Even if they claim they are giving priority to these domains. (Hey all these links to them might even help them, Egad). If I were Canadian or from Utah, I’d be questioning my tax funded tourism professionals and asking why, how much, and to prove its worth.

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