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                             THE STANDARD'S
                        T E C H  T R A V E L E R
         Travel and the Travel Industry in the New Millennium
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                                        | http://www.thestandard.com |

Monday, March 12, 2001

NEWS BRIEFS:
* A Pair of Lone Wolves ... Traveling for Business ... Agents Empowered

TOP STORY:
* TLD or Not TLD?

SITE REVIEW:
* CultureFinder.com

NEWS BRIEFS
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A PAIR OF LONE WOLVES: More than a week after Northwest Airlines and
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines pulled the plug on travel agency commissions
for online ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada, it appears the two
carriers haven't started a trend. No other airline has implemented
similar cuts, and Travelocity.com remains the only major travel
e-retailer to levy a service charge on Northwest and KLM tickets.
Meanwhile, Northwest is luring buyers to its own Web site with a 5
percent discount for some excursion fares booked online by Friday of
this week.

TRAVELING FOR BUSINESS? ETrieve, an Oregon-based supplier of
corporate wireless communications services, announced a deal with Dell
Computer last Thursday to bundle its mobile data access service with Dell
server packages for small- to medium-sized businesses. The system,
which works in concert with Microsoft Exchange, allows traveling
employees to use their mobile phones to dial into the eTrieve service
and listen to e-mail messages or other data read by text-to-speech
voice synthesizers. Voice messages can also be stored as digital audio
files and attached to e-mail replies.

AGENTS EMPOWERED: A distribution deal announced last week will add a
range of sightseeing and recreational services to the e-Agent Internet
portal, a Web-based booking platform for travel agents. The agreement
between Galileo International - the Illinois-based company that owns
e-Agent - and a Sydney, Australia-based company called Viator Systems,
which supplies online content, technology and distribution services
for the travel industry, will establish a direct link from e-Agent to
Viator's international inventory of destination products. This allows
agents to book day trips, sightseeing cruises and other activities in
conjunction with air travel and hotel accommodations already available
on the e-Agent platform.

TOP STORY
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TLD or Not TLD?

Nearly 4 months after ICANN nixed its application for a '.travel'
top-level domain, a congress of travel industry representatives
attempts to resurrect it.

By Morris Dye

When we last reported on the proposed creation of a new top-level
domain for travel-related e-commerce sites in December, the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the U.S.-sponsored body
that oversees Internet addressing conventions, had recently refused to
endorse ".travel" in its controversial first round of domain
applications. The prognosis looked grim for one industry group's bid
to make .travel Internet addresses a reality.

But at an industry summit last month in Geneva, the .travel initiative
gained new momentum as an ad hoc assembly of various trade groups,
travel companies and e-business concerns met to discuss strategies for
overturning the Nov. 16 decision that placed ".travel" on hold
indefinitely. If approved, use of the .travel address would be
restricted to companies that meet certain high standards; this,
according to the group, would not only create a safer e-commerce
environment, it would boost business by raising consumer confidence in
those sites.

Among the almost 60 delegates at the meeting were representatives of
the American Automobile Association, domain registrar VeriSign  and
the 26,000-member American Society of Travel Agents, which initially
opposed the .travel bid on the grounds that the International Air
Transport Association - the trade group that initially filed the
application - would not fairly represent the travel industry as a
whole. IATA spokesman Tim Goodyear said the delegates agreed that no
single organization or industry sector should be allowed to dominate
the initiative. Under the terms of IATA's original proposal, a
managing board representing various facets of the travel industry
would write and enforce criteria for evaluating applicants.

Sandra Hughes, vice president of travel services for AAA who attended
the meeting, said delegates formed a working group to develop
proposals regarding how the .travel TLD would operate if passed, and
the committee is due to report on its activities at a second .travel
summit tentatively set for May in Montreal.

Meanwhile, attorneys for IATA have filed a formal 8,000-word complaint
with ICANN's board of directors that argues ICANN failed to evaluate
the proposal in accordance with its own guidelines. "One can only
conclude," the complaint stated, "that the nine announced criteria
were simply ignored when it came to evaluation of the IATA
application." Almost three months after the complaint was filed, ICANN
has yet to publish a formal response. A reaction came, however, from a
coalition of travel agent registry groups that opposes the IATA
proposal. The group sent ICANN a strongly worded rebuttal to IATA's
arguments in favor of the domain, saying IATA's application is meant
to build "a campaign of fear and consumer-doubt" about travel sales on
the Internet. "While IATA infers that its application of a restricted
TLD is necessary to ward off travel scams and is intended to protect
consumers from unreliable Internet travel sellers," the letter states,
"it provides no statistics or evidence to support that consumers have
been subjected to any major Internet travel scams."

ICANN declined to answer queries about the .travel domain, but
spokesman Brett LaGrande did say that the TLD applications not
selected in November are not necessarily out of the picture: "Their
applications are still with ICANN and may be brought up again at a
later date, but probably not until next year at the earliest."

A new twist to the saga came to the fore last week when alternative
domain registry New.net rolled out its own version of the .travel
domain, one of 20 suffixes now available exclusively through the
New.net service with no restrictive criteria for domain name
applicants. (Though, because New.net addresses are not included in
standard DNS registries, users must download a software plug-in to
direct page requests to the host server.)

IATA's Goodyear says he doesn't consider New.net a threat to the
.travel initiative, adding that IATA isn't interested in launching
.travel on an alternative root: "Our focus is on getting the TLD on
the 'A' root, which practically all Internet users rely on." The
existence of unrestricted .travel addresses on alternate roots could
eventually become a source of confusion for consumers seeking the
safety of a regulated commercial environment on the Web.

Read more about .travel and the New.net service at TheStandard.com:
http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,22643,00.html?nl=tt

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SITE REVIEW
~~~~~~~~~~~
CultureFinder.com

Late last year, when sagging confidence in the dot-com sector caused
this highbrow arts and entertainment directory to lose its primary
source of funding from the Comcast Interactive Capital Group, which
had sunk $7.5 million in the venture, its producers decided to convert
it into a tax-exempt corporation along the lines of PBS or NPR. Now
that the process of gaining not-for-profit status is under way,
CultureFinder continues to publish its database of theater, music and
opera, visual arts and dance events in about 50 U.S. cities. Its
efficient engine allows searches by genre, date and destination, and
there's a user-friendly e-mail tool you can use to send yourself a
reminder about any given event - or e-mail the information to a
friend. Registered members also can keep an ongoing reminder list and
calendar for planning future trips. While Citysearch and Digital City
include similar information in their extensive entertainment listings,
if you're specifically interested in learning what's on at the Chicago
symphony next month or what art exhibitions will be in town during
your next visit to New York, the simplicity of CultureFinder proves
that on the Web, more isn't always better.

STAFF        
~~~~~
Written by Michael Shapiro and Morris Dye. Send e-mail to
techtrav@yahoo.com.
Editor: Michele Keller (mkeller@thestandard.com).

Copyright 2001 Standard Media International

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