USATP Blog //

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Truth in advertising? Hardly

I read with great interest the recent blast email from my former tour training school. Yes, the same ones who felt USA Tour Pros somehow needed to seek their blessing before shooting personal Video Resumes for our Members for use on our own Web site (while in San Diego in 2008). The message of the email was as clear as, say, the reason graduates are asked to submit lists of questions to be discussed at the company symposium that are rarely, if ever, addressed.

So the story goes, our friends from San Francisco are now partnering with a Web site which claims in the email, “For the first time, tour operators, journalists and television/film production companies seeking experienced tour directors (like you!) will have a one-stop location from which to identify individuals with specific expertise.” Nice tease, but you’re a bit late, fellas. A site already doing the same thing since February 2008 is already on the market.

For the past year-and-a-half, USA Tour Pros has promoted our Web site as “North America’s leading Tour Professional’s resource and social-networking web site offering Individual and Business Members a ‘one-stop shopping’ location for all aspects of the Tour industry.” Why were we so sure we were the leaders? Simple: no one else was doing it. So we found the boast in the recent blast email as being, well, a bit tardy as well as ironically worded. Of course, this email also makes it clear that this offer to promote tour professionals to tour operators is provided at “NO COST!”—well, no cost other than the fact you had to be a graduate of the several-thousand-dollar training school to even know about the new Web site. Truth in advertising be damned.

Because of this offer’s apparent benefit to tour professionals I took a look. I made a profile. What was I asked next? I was asked to plan a trip. Yes, I was asked to add destination information to a company’s Web site to further enhance my own career. Makes perfect sense, right?

My personal profile on this “groundbreaking” Web site allows you a small section to write something about yourself. Oh, and I can post a picture, even add my own personal Website address or Twitter account. News flash, folks! One, most Tour Professionals don’t have their own Web site, and with good reason. They are difficult to locate and it costs a lot of money to have a good one. Two, almost none of the Tour Professionals I work with use Twitter, much less have an account. For a twenty-something crowd, it’s a nice addition. I don’t work with many twenty-somethings.

There are no job listings.

There’s no place to upload a resume.

There is no free Video Resume available.

There is no place to place your work availability calendar.

There’s no searchable database for the Tour Professionals adding all of the information.

There are no public Forums to share information of the industry—something a lot of Tour Professionals value when marketing themselves. Our extensive Forums section allows Tour Professionals to write frankly about news, thoughts, opinions, etc. concerning the industry. The new site allows you to build their destination database at no charge to you. Kind of them.

What this email and partnership says to me is what I knew all along when developing USA Tour Pros. We’d be successful because no one person or school was offering to help the Tour professional after paid training. I will be the first to admit the training school behind this email is excellent at attracting new Tour Professionals to the industry, selling them common-sense tour training (for a fee), inviting graduates to a glorified reunion (for lack of a better word) once a year (for a fee), and offering graduates training trips (for a fee). What do you get for free? The chance to give away your hard-earned destination knowledge to their “partner” under the guise of networking to Tour Operators.

P.T. Barnum just smiled.