Orbitz, which once told travel agents, "If an online player tells you it's your friend, honey, it just ain't so," has decided to make nice with TAs and start an affiliate program. At least that’s what Orbitz CEO Jeff Katz recently told a Travel Weekly editor. When we learned this, we had a brief “we told you so” moment, but realized that Orbitz deserves praise, not derision, for its decision. The mark of any company that’s being properly run is its ability to shed prejudices or practices that no longer make sense. The notion that traditional travel agents would be aced aside forever by the Internet has proven to be a silly one. Congrats to Katz and Orbitz for figuring that out.    

Yahoo announced in its July 27 “What’s New” section under Travel  > News and Media that “Cultured Traveler, The” is now officially on its radar. The site describes TCT as a “travel newsletter with destination reviews and editor picks.” We’re always happy to come to the attention of any big players on the Internet, but, really: After four years of steady online publishing, we’re “new?”.

Travel Science (www.travelscience.com), a Georgia-based company that makes pocket-sized travel and language aids, recently handed us a huge compliment. The company lists sites that have comprehensive links to government tourists’ bureaus and offices worldwide, as well as U.S. states and Canadian provinces. Its description of our list: “They have the best list we have found on the Web. Easy to use and well organized. Try them first.” Dang, that feels good.

Spammers’ compliance in July with the Feds’ recently passed Can-Spam legislation was a miserable 0.54%, according to Denver-based MX Logic. That means that almost 99.5% of all commercial e-mails fail to meet such legal requirements as providing opt-out capabilities for consumers or providing verifiable return addresses. Until July, compliance had been running at an unimpressive 3%, hardly a figure to brag about. Why the sudden drop in an already disastrous compliance rate? MX theorizes that because Can-Spam enforcement is so lax and spotty, previously compliant spammers figure they run little risk from reverting to their old ways. Also, there simply may be more spammers, a fact that could severely dilute compliance. It gets worse: Spam was running at 50% of all e-mails a year ago. At its current rate of expansion, spam will account for more than 90% of all e-mails sometime in 2005. One possible solution: Sender ID, a protocol that would force spammers to reveal their true Internet addresses

The New York Times reports that 3 billion messages a day arrive at the computers that run Hotmail, a Microsoft service with 170 million subscribers. The service then blocks 2.7 billion of those messages, determining them to be spam, and delivers the remaining 300 million. Even then, nobody’s sure what percentage of the e-mail that gets through is also spam. This is an intolerable situation. If 90% of all your incoming mail is junked before you ever have a chance to see it, you’re running the risk of wrecking your business by alienating customers who think you’re snubbing them even though you’re not. Do not use free services like Yahoo or Hotmail, and avoid mass services like AOL, which make your company look dated and unprofessional. If you need to get your mail when you’re out of the office, make sure your ISP offers a web-based service that allows you to connect to your mail account from any browser anywhere.

Here are some School of Hard Knocks pointers on how you can cut down on spam:

• ·     Change your current e-mail address and then do not list it on your web site or anywhere where it can be harvested by spammers. If you were receiving harassing calls, you’d change your phone number, make it unlisted and be careful who you gave it to. Same idea.

•       Install a form that goes directly to a database, included standard for all Travel Webs sites. See how we do it E-Mail Us. A form going to an auto-email feature won't cut it as this still has your address listed in the HTML code and can be harvested.

• ·     Get a separate Yahoo account or something like it for all your online window shopping and other contacts with people or sites you don’t know. Since this will be the site where spam will more likely to collect, you won’t have to visit it all that often or take it all that seriously.

• ·     Use a separate e-mail account for any mass mailings you do so your address can't be harvested from infected computers you may send to. This will also help you control and quarantine viruses that come back from infected machines that have been programmed to auto-reply to all incoming e-mails. Viruses are a serious matter: More than 10% of you reading this have viruses. We know this because every month we receive hundreds of virus-infected emails only moments after we send out this newsletter. 

Sometimes when your neighbors do something wrong it instructs you in what you should be doing right. The neighbor in this case is the UK. When customer relationship management (CRM) provider Talisma surveyed 110 UK travel companies in June about their responses to e-mail queries, the results were unsettling: 44% of the companies failed to respond to e-mail queries sent to their customer service addresses. Of the 56% that bothered to respond, only 45% answered the specific questions customers had asked. The survey further revealed that 94% of agents answering the phones at the companies surveyed had no access to e-mails sent in by  existing or potential clients. We won’t play our broken record here about answering e-mail queries out of common courtesy and because they could turn into closed sales. Instead, we’re going to chalk it up to Darwin: some companies are so clueless that they are their own worst enemies. They don’t deserve to survive and they won’t.