In keeping with its ultra-cool image, W Hotels has introduced a VIP program called "W The Card," which it calls an "all-access pass" to "a year full of fabulous experiences, irresistible partner perks, VIP treatments and up-to-the-second updates on anything and everything happening in W hotel destinations around the globe." The company also said the program was "the epitome of what it means to be an insider." What officials of parent company Starwood won't say, however, is what it takes to get one. "That's the whole point" one person said, emphasizing the secretive, exclusive nature of the program. Or maybe, TC thinks, it's the company's most innovative marketing ploy yet. After all, if no one knows what the rules are for getting a W card, they will respond to every marketing overture in hopes of getting one.
YTB Travel Network, which was canceled by IATA last fall for "improper lending, subcontracting or hiring to a third party of an IATA numeric code," is taking a back-door stab at gaining IATA approval in Canada as a result of its purchase of a small IATA agency, the $2 million Sunrise Travel in Toronto. A YTB exec told TC that it bought Sunrise in order to satisfy Ontario regulatory requirements that YTB have a physical presence in the province in order to do business there. As for IATA, the exec said the sellers were applying for change-of-ownership approval, and "IATA could deny this, but we hope not."
Washington Dulles could be the next U.S. gateway for Cayman Airways, which hopes to connect with some of the business feeding into and out of the airport from low-cost transatlantic carriers and then funnel it down to Grand Cayman. The carrier served Washington in the early '90s but the route was discontinued in 1993. The new route would not affect Cayman Airways' five weekly flights into JFK which, TC hears, might be boosted to six a week by the summer.
Could there be such a thing as a Spitzer-bump in the travel industry? With continuing tumult in the markets, bankers and brokers have had little to rejoice about lately. But on the day New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned following a prostitution scandal, Regent Seven Seas had one of its best booking days of the year. Coincidence? Or were the scorned Wall Street bigwigs, whom Spitzer built his name taking down when he was the state's attorney general, so enraptured by schadenfreude that they chose to book a luxury cruise vacation?