By Patrick Totty

Cultural Travels has been up on the Web for almost three years. We’ve survived the dot-com bust and have watched far better-funded travel sites crash and burn. We’re still here for two very good reasons: We’ve built our database – the biggest of its kind in the world – thoughtfully and thoroughly, with an eye to how people seek and use information.

We’ve created an open site that is not a pawn or a front for any special interest. Everybody who comes here – travelers, travel agents and tour hosts – finds honest information and something of value.

To build upon those strengths, we’ve recently introduced or added some new services. Among them:

Inside CT, our monthly Kiplinger Report-style online newsletter for travel agents and tour operators. We present short travel industry-related items and observations, as well as updates on Cultural Travels itself. If you want to see what we are saying to our travel industry peers, go here: "Inside Cultural Travels."

Our new newsletter format: We’ve standardized the look of this newsletter, partly to make it more readable and partly to provide better, more consistent-looking ad spaces for the companies that support us.

Our Web Page Ad concept continues to be unique to the Internet. Many web sites continue to mess around with banner ads and increasingly irritating “dominator” ads that either take over your desktop for 20 or 30 seconds, or pop up on top of material you’re trying to read.

Some are even programmed to not yield to your repeated clicks of the “back” button if you accidentally click on them and get taken somewhere you’d rather not be.

Our idea is simple: Run magazine-style ads that don’t intrude but make it plainly clear the advertiser is sponsoring a particular page. Also make it possible for comparison shoppers to get extensive information about a tour operator without having to leave the Cultural Travels site.

Because Web Page Ads function like a field or branch office for our advertisers, they have become a great way to extend a company’s presence on the Web without costing an arm and a leg.

What’s up for the future? We’re extending our educational role and getting ready to role out a primer that will show travel agents and tour hosts how to better use the Internet and advertising on it. The indirect effect on travelers who visit here will be better organized, timelier information, and more of it.

We’ve also begun looking into publishing special editions of The Cultured Traveler that cover just one destination. This will allow us to take a deeper look at places that offer more to sophisticated travelers than often gets reported.

We’ve also introduced new policies for freelance writers that we think are among the best on the Internet. Currently, we do not commission original pieces because we’re not yet big enough to pay the kind of fair and decent price that such work deserves.

However, we do pay $25 upon acceptance for one-time use of previously published pieces, with all rights reverting to the writer after we publish it. (We do ask to be able to place any such stories we use in our permanent archives, the same way a newspaper retains articles in its archives.) For more information, go to Submissions.

We’ll report to you from time to time what else is going on here. 

Cheers!