The Facts Half-Truths About YTB--Part 5

Today, let's take a look at the fifth tab on the new YTB site called www.TheFactsAboutYTB.com :

In The News:
This by far is the most amusing and deceptive page of the site. Most of this has been rehashed, but here we go again.

• Inc. Magazine--it was a paid advertisement
• Funshine East Travel Trade Show--39 Vendors for a sales force of 138,000 is ridiculous. Apparently most vendors do not see value in paying to attend. It needs to be noted that of the 39 vendors, a lot were YTB related companies--YTB Cars, YTB Flowers, the YTB Store, etc.
• Saturday Evening Post--YTB paid to have Coach Tomer on the cover.
• Sorensen named "influential". This is true, but Jack the Ripper was also influential. Sorensen was named influential not for any good brought to the travel table, but for infusing the industry with 100,000 untrained people looking for free trips and upgrades calling themselves travel agents.
• #26 in Travel Weekly. Again, true. But the numbers are self reported and not verified by the publication other than to have an executive say they are right. And again the actual article states that YTB RTAs only produced $211M and not $414M.
  

So, it seems that the good news for YTB must be purchased. As for the bad news, no one needs to look too far. Just do a Google search.

As a matter of fact, here are a bunch of not so good news stories that YTB neglected to include in the "In The News" section: