YTB FAQ's - Team Ubiquity

Some Other Important Things to Know!

How to I find outside vendors' phone numbers (other than those on my Booking Engine)?
To find outside vendors' phone numbers (other than vendors available through your booking engine) you may visit www.otid.com or www.USTOA.com. These are The Official Travel Industry Directory lists of vendors worldwide. If you contact one of these vendors directly, please be sure you identify yourself and give them your ARC or CLIA number. Verify their commission policy. If you book with one of these vendors, and they pay commissions, don't forget to complete and submit a Commission Claim Form through your Travel Portal. Remember that not all vendors pay commissions.

Why doesn't the booking engine show a lock symbol when processing payment?

Your booking engine actually "frames" the vendor website that is collecting the payment information so you are not able to see the vendor's lock symbol. However, if you right click on the payment screen and select properties from the menu, it should show the address beginning with "https." The 's' after the http means that it is a secure site.

First, based on what can be found on their websites (www.iata.org and www.iatan.org ) they are not the beginning nor the end of the say-so in the travel industry regarding Internet booked travel.

Read about their foundations:IATA - The International Air Transport Association (IATA) - was founded in Havana, Cuba, in April 1945. It is the prime vehicle for inter-airline cooperation in promoting safe, reliable, secure and economical air services - for the benefit of the world's consumers. The international scheduled air transport industry is now more than 100 times larger than it was in 1945. Few industries can match the dynamism of that growth, which would have been much less spectacular without the standards, practices and procedures developed within IATA.At its founding, IATA had 57 members from 31 nations, mostly in Europe and North America. Today it has some 240 members from more than 140 nations in every part of the globe.The modern IATA is the successor to the International Air Traffic Association founded in the Hague in 1919 - the year of the world's first international scheduled services.

IATAN: The International Airlines Travel Agent Network IATAN's mission is to promote professionalism, administer meaningful and impartial business standards, and to provide cost-effective products, services and educational programs that benefit the travel industry. Through the use of its informational and other resources, IATAN provides a vital link between the supplier community and the U.S. travel distribution network.Basically, the argument these two organizations support is that of traditional travel agents who feel that home based travel agents are not true "professionals"in the travel field.

These groups tend to have members who have made enough noise to where they have a few organization affiliates (tour companies like Perillo Tours and cruise lines like Royal Caribbean) fearing that Our company is in direct conflict with their tradition on how travel was booked prior to the Internet. Travel agents ALWAYS used referral based, word of mouth marketing. What has them upset is the fact that Our Company is growing so rapidly and they feel that any Internet based company the size of Our Company will jeopardize their relationships with their current vendors. This is not the case.

Our Company is documented by www.dsa.org, as a recently inducted member, as well as the Securities and Exchange Commission. When the DSA and the SEC run you through the ringer, and you come up clean, what difference does it make when a group does not understand what you are truly made of? We are still a legitimate travel agency.

Comparing apples to apples, IATA nor IATAN have any lasting significant influence over what we are truly all about; helping families do better for themselves by teaching them, with no experience necessary, how to use the Internet to their advantage in travel and business by creating an army of home based entrepreneurs who refer others to their websites. Royal Caribbean is just a ship that passed in the night who took advantage of the $13 MILLION worth of travel that Our RTAs sold for them. Now, we are basically saying, "Royal Caribbean who?"

We have already been on record that we are not concerned with the audiences of well established traditional agencies, but with those who prefer to book their travel online, giving both the online home business owner as well as the vendors a bigger share of the travel marketplace.

"We are building a new company with new ideas." The Internet with a new face."

Hopefully IATA and IATAN traditional travel agents don't faint when our company hits 250,000 TSO's by the end of 2010!

Travel will double to $14 trillion by the end of the decade.

The surge of the travel momentum is here. The baby boomer's retiring, 1 every 8 seconds for the next 17 years will ensure healthy consistent growth.

Plus, being in the biggest industry in the history of the world, far bigger even than the oil industry, is the biggest economic clue of all.

Buckle up everyone!

Get ready for the HUGE travel wave. It's at each and every one of our doorsteps right now.

Are we committed to each helping educate someone else who would love to cash in on the rewards for more time, family stability, health benefits, retirement cushion, and life choice for their loved ones? That's the goal for those of us who are serious about it. There is more to life than money: there is the ability to bless others with something that's out there for ALL of us to take part in.

People will never stop entertaining themselves using the vehicle of travel. It happens where we're born, when we die, and everywhere in-between. That goes for people we know, and people we know who know people we don't know, and so on and so forth, for the next 17 years.

Saturation? I think not. . .!