We conservatively estimate that 12,000 of our users over the past year purchased a $5,000 trip (usually a trip for two) from one of the 1,850 specialty tour operators listed on the Cultural Travels web site. That adds up to $60 million in sales generated by people who came to our site actively looking for travel options and something to buy. We’re not talking about people who came to us first and then contacted operators later by phone or letter – we’re talking about people who clicked through deliberately from our site to the sites of the operators they eventually contracted with. Yes, we know we’re no Expedia or Orbitz, but $60 million is a nice chunk of change. Watch for that figure to have grown significantly by this time next year.

Alexa is a tracking service that ranks web sites by popularity. It offers a simple equation: The more visitors using Alexa’s tool bar your site receives, the higher it ranks you. A site ranked 44^th is doing far better than one ranked 28,000^th. Cultural Travels doesn’t rank very high on Alexa- here’s why: Alexa is a form of spy ware. By installing it on your PC it then tracks which sites you visit and uses that info to make its rankings. But here’s the rub: Corporations ban such insidious software from their networks – so do informed Internet users. The vast majority of visitors to our web sites are corporate workers – people in high-paying positions who are interested in discovering unique products and experiences. Upshot: Our travelers are web savvy professionals who lead, not follow, the masses.

One of Alexa’s criteria for measuring a web site’s ranking is how fast the site loads information. This has got to be one of the most unsophisticated, bass-ackwards ways of reckoning ranking that we’ve run into in a long time. Alexa makes no distinction between a 2-dimential web page that has a few words of straight text and one of our interactive database driven pages, a display which can have up to 400 records on it – the equivalent of 400 pages of simple text! (Try clicking on “Theme,” then “History” and then “Directory of all History Tour Hosts” on our web site. The final click in that series will call up 242 entries.) This is Alexa dull-wittedly comparing not even apples and oranges, but animals and minerals. We think that waiting 2-3 seconds for one of our information-rich pages ain’t half bad. Apparently Alexa thinks how fast you get somewhere is more important than whether that somewhere is even worth arriving at.

The upcoming March issue of The Cultured Traveler will focus on the U.S. South, including looks at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, Thomas Jefferson’s World Heritage Site at Monticello and the beauties of Shenandoah National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway. The South, which many people often see as a monolithic blur, is actually the most varied of the United States’ major regions. There are more distinct dialects of American English in the South than in the rest of the country combined, and the region’s topography varies from high mountains and vast woodlands to deeply indented bays, great meandering rivers and huge swamps and tidal estuaries. The region, long scorned for a racist past that spurred millions of black Americans to flee north is now enjoying a vast in-migration of African Americans coming back to settle in what many of them now consider their ancestral American homeland. If you have any insights, tours, articles or stories about the South you’d like to see published in March, contact us ASAP at 1-888-443-8687.

In April The Cultured Traveler will take to the hiking trails, bike lanes, mountain passes, river rapids and seashores to focus on vacations, travel and activities that depend on “people power.” We’re talking about river-running, bicycle touring, mountain climbing, canoeing and kayaking, hiking and running as forms of recreation and pleasure. Since there are so many of you that offer trips in this category, we’d like to invite you to contribute articles or offer yourselves as subjects of our Tour Host Review or Pick of the Month features. Don’t be afraid to approach us and toot your own horn. As the saying goes, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Or as we often sob around press time, “How are we gonna give you publicity if we don’t know you exist??” 1-888-443-8687

(Where we keep reminding you to do the things that will help you sell travel!)

Update your trips – Almost four years later and you’d think we’d start charging operators for listing their trips on our web site for free. Quick, take advantage before we come to our senses! To update, go to www.culturaltravels.com/Services/ and follow the directions there.

Keep your online newsletter fresh – Ain’t nothing deader than copy that hasn’t been updated in weeks or months. If you don’t care, why should your potential customers? (By the way, you can use articles from The Cultured Traveler in your newsletter – subject to certain benign restrictions – for free. Call 888-443-8687 to find out how.

Answer e-mail queries pronto – Love means never putting off until tomorrow answering queries quickly and politely. People who take the time to e-mail you questions already are positively disposed toward you. Why alienate potential clients by ignoring them?

Publish a travel article in The Cultured Traveler – When you do, search engines like Google will pick up on it because they’re always looking for relevant information. This is free advertising for your company. To submit an article, contact Sheri Leigh at 888-443-8687. See writer’s guidelines at www.theculturedtraveler.com/Submissions/Submissions.htm

Online advertisers spent $2.2 billion in the last quarter of 2003 and $7.2 billion for the year, for a net gain of 20% in spending over 2002. Those figures, reported by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, show that online ads are now the fastest growing ad segment for all media.

Online consumers fall into four groups, according to the Online Publishers Association (OPA): “Onliners,” “Multi-Channelers,” “Dabblers” and “Offliners.” Onliners (70% male; 60% over age 35; 64% with high-speed access) spend 21 hours online each week (vs. 14 watching TV) and 82% of them say that they’d rather rely on a web site than on another medium for their shopping information. Onliners comprise 29% of all respondents to an OPA survey.

One fifth of all U.S. households (21.5 million) now have broadband, says Jupiter Research. This is good news not only because it allows online advertisers to offer richer, more sophisticated Web content, but also because increased broadband usage has sparked a price war among and usage up. Net result: More opportunities for tour operators to reach more potential clients with beautifully rendered web sites.