A Real Host Speaks Out on YTB

In Travel Trade, Travel Planners International spoke out on the damage YTB is doing to the industry. Some of the comments made by their President, Ken Gagliano include:

• It's the MLM hype or the dream of not having to work and make millions that lure these people in and end up tarnishing all of the hard work we committed professionals do.
• I have no compassion for the thousands who bought this and found out that they got burned - it's foolish that people buy this stuff and it's even more ludicrous the number of suppliers that actually work with the MLMs. Are they actually that desperate for the little amount of business that actually comes in?
• With the MLMs, consumers are misled to believe that they are working with a true travel agent, when in fact it's just a booking engine. It might be a different story if the MLMs would actually provide fundamental training on the industry, supplier training along with B2B booking tools. For the most part, they provide the training on how to recruit others and provide a consumer Web site as their booking tool.
  

As usual, here is yet another person that is dead on. He even acknowledges that there are a few good agents in YTB that just made a very poor decision. He said THAT is the challenge, weeding out the few good from the thousands of bad!

On another forum, there was some speculation that there was a forthcoming partnership or other "association" with TPI because they apparently were seen at the YTB Funshine. Well, it appears they were only there (if indeed they were there) looking for one or two of the good ones!