Over the past few weeks, Enterprise Webs, our parent company, has been doing a “soft opening” of Poor Alice, our online book-selling sister site. We think Poor Alice is robust, easy to use, competitive with the Amazons and just as secure. Since it uses the same fulfillment house as the big boys, bring it on! Now we need to test the site to see if it’s all the things we say it is, and we’d like members of the travel industry to be our testers. We’ll give you a 25% discount on any or all books you buy from Poor Alice over the next week. Just use discount code 10025. Please be our guest and roam around the site and test it for convenience, logic and attractiveness. Let us know what you think. For details, contact Sheri Leigh at 1-888-443-8687.

We return to this topic often because it’s both our bread and butter and yours: You don’t have to be a big or ultra-sophisticated enterprise to compete on the Web with Fortune 1000 companies. Ten years ago, that would have been true. But recent advances in PC technology offer small businesses a real chance to offer the same level of services on their web sites that their far larger competitors do. Of course, the rub is getting the time to master this wonderful technology. That’s where companies like Enterprise Webs come in. They know small business needs and concerns, and can help them with everything from creating a web site and an online newsletter to installing an e-commerce capability or plotting out a five-year business plan. Best of all, they offer a soup-to-nuts approach that is far less costly than buying services piecemeal. Please keep us in mind.

Top execs from the U.S. Tour Operators Association who recently gathered at the CruiseTour World trade show in Florida say the summer travel season may turn out to be stronger than anybody hoped for. Not surprisingly, Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific and the western U.S. continue to boast strong bookings, partly because they are perceived as both scenic and safe. Even Europe is surging, the execs reported, most likely from a combination of pent-up demand and the relaxation of tensions over the war in Iraq. They advised travel agents to combat price-cutting on the Internet by selling benefits as well as cost and by pointing out that experienced middlemen are the best defense the traveling public has against too-good-to-be-true online offers. 

Nielsen/NetRatings’ late March list of the top 10 online travel sites has some interesting nuggets in it. The top 10 sites are: MapQuest, Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, AOL Travel, Southwest Airlines, Yahoo! Travel, American Airlines, Hotels.com and Cheap Tickets. Here’s what’s interesting: MapQuest had almost twice as many unique visitors in March (3.92 million) as Expedia (1.99 million), which says a lot about how consumers are using the Internet as a research, as well as a buying, tool. Number six Southwest Airlines (875,000 unique visitors) pulled in 35% more traffic than American Airlines (646,000 unique visitors). This is an “uh-oh” moment for American and other big carriers: Little Southwest is the wave of the future and you can be certain the bigs are sweating bullets over it at this very moment.

Julie Conover produces a delightful travel show, Passport to Adventure, that’s been popping up on PBS stations nationwide. She has asked us to ask you if you might put in a good word for her show – and other travel shows – with your local PBS station. “The program is a great way to get the public excited about travel,” she says, a line of reasoning that makes sense to us. If you’d like more information, go to www.PassportToAdventure.com or you can contact Julie at Julie@PassportToAventure.com

This is a tough one and we don’t have any easy solution to offer. A UCLA report on the Internet said that 92% of consumers have “at least some level of concern” about using their credit cards online. Sixth-three percent said they were “very” or “extremely” concerned. Consumer fears in this regard are a lot like fears of flying – even though flying is the second safest form of travel (elevators are first), there’s always that irrational dread at the back of many people’s minds. Modern encryption, such as what our Poor Alice online bookstore uses, makes it so hard to hack a credit card number that one mathematician has estimated it would take a supercomputer several billion years to crack just one transaction. But that number could be 100 billion years and there would still be doubts. As we said, we don’t know what it will take to ease people’s minds.

Illinois-based OpinionLab, Inc. says in a recent audit of the Internet’s 50 most trafficked web sites that while all of them provide feedback forms for visitors, a surprisingly large number of them continue to ignore suggested best practices. For example, only one web site (2%) places a feedback link prominently on each page. Only seven sites (14%) return users to the Web page they were on before they submitted feedback. Also, the number of clicks required to submit feedback increased from an average of 2.22 clicks in 2001 to 2.44 clicks in 2003. These might seem to be small things, but every time visitors to your web site are inconvenienced, it becomes one more reason – however unconscious – for them to not do business with you.

Broadcasting works on TV, but it’s a loser on the Internet. That’s because people can select which channel they want to view on TV, but are at the mercy of spammers and advertisers whenever they turn on their computer e-mail program. This is all to say, don’t waste your money (or your business’s goodwill) on rented e-mail lists. They are far too indiscriminate to help you (“Our list has 20 million travelers’ names!”) and they tick off all the would-be customers who’ve never heard of you. The alternative is harder than mass mailing, but works better in the long run: Use your online newsletter as a way to amass the names of people who want to hear from you (we can help you set up and publish a newsletter). Or sponsor somebody else’s travel-related newsletter (like The Cultured Traveler). That way you know you’re reaching people who are willing to take the time to read your message. 

• Don’t encourage the buggers! It turns out that 8% of consumers report that they have bought something online from spammers – people who sent them unwanted, unasked-for solicitations. Yet a vast majority of consumers hate spam. Go figure.
• The best way to get rid of spam? Consumers say that rather than hit the “unsubscribe” button that’s attached to a lot of spam, they just simply delete the message. This is classic “once-burned-twice-shy” behavior. It turns out that many spammers use “unsubscribe” buttons to confirm that e-mail addresses are current – all the better to sell them to other spammers.
• Why some people will never go on the Internet: 42% of Americans are still not on the Web, and a majority of them may never get there. Older and poorer people tend to avoid it, partially because of the cost of going online and partially because PC technology – advanced as it is – remains frustrating and elusive for many people.