Dr. Tanya Abrahamse, Executive Director of the Tourism Business Council of South Africa (TBCSA), has been appointed to the Interim Board of The Travel Partnership Corporation (TTPC), a consortium of travel industry bodies representing a broad cross-section of the industry, formed to bring to the travel industry its own dedicated space on the Internet.
At the TTPC Board meeting in Berlin, March 17th, Chairman of the Board, Jean-Claude Baumgarten, said: “ We warmly welcome Dr. Abrahamse to the TTPC Board. She has a wealth of expertise in the tourism sector and her leadership qualities will be especially valuable as we move into an exciting phase of the .travel initiative, now the application has been filed with ICANN and TTPC is in the process of expansion”.
As Executive Director of TBCSA (which includes the National Association of Travel Agencies), Dr. Abrahamse leads the foremost tourism industry body in South Africa. Previous positions held include Deputy Director General of the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, South Africa and Chief Director of the Reconstruction and Development Programme, South Africa. Dr. Abrahamse’s appointment will help to bring .travel to the Continent as well as ensuring the African perspective is properly represented on this innovative technological project.
The Travel Partnership Corporation (TTPC), a non-profit corporation, has been formed to promote the addition to the Internet of a new sponsored top-level domain (sTLD) to be known as .travel; and, to recommend policies and practices concerning the administration of the registered domain names in the .travel sTLD.
Open to all bona fide travel and tourism associations, TTPC is a consortium of travel industry bodies representing a broad cross-section of the industry. The actual size of the industry, from the perspective of directory subscribers and domain name holders, is estimated to be in excess of 1,000,000 travel providers, purveyors, and associated entities—a constituency comprised of travel agents, tour operators, airlines, hotels, car rental companies, cruise lines, bus companies, ferries, rail lines, theme parks, convention bureaus, and national tourism offices.
Tourism’s economic impact is four times as large as global steel exports, 50% larger than the export of clothes and textiles, and equal to the global export of automobiles. Underscoring these statistics, travel and tourism accounts for 10% of all international trade, 5% of total global economic output, and leads all online transactions at 28% of the total.
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