This is something I worked on a little before retiring. I notice that if anything the situation has got worse. The position is that real live travel agencies have been having a very hard time over the last few years trying to compete with a small number of price-aggressive online operators like Expedia. To get another revenue channel many independents have turned their websites into closet affiliates of a small number of such online operators. Closet because each site looks individual and independent. Delve a little bit deeper and the only original content is the name and possibly the address of the real travel agent. The website itself is an affiliate in the sense that bookings are made direct with another company and the travel agent gets a commission, no human intervention by the travel agent. Of course that is what travel agents have always done, sold a product on commission, but in days gone by an agent would actually have to do something. In DMOZ terms such sites are affiliates, and the directory is littered with them. I cleaned up a couple of cities a while back, but take a look at Regional/North_America/United_States/Massachusetts/Localities/B/Boston/Travel_and_Tourism/Travel_Services/Travel_Agents/ All bar one are affiliates Commonwealth Travel Advisors - onlineagency.com affiliate Crystal Travel - amadeus.net affiliate Garber Travel Services - onlineagency.com affiliate 5 Star Travel Service - assorted affiliations Sunshine Boston - gotobus.com affiliate - plus odd for the flights the links email a hotmail account. Boston was the first one I went to, purely at random. It was exactly the same when I first came across this problem last year, every city I looked at had exactly the same pattern. onlineagency.com looks to be the most common. This is not limited to the US though it is particularly prevalent there. I would estimate that maybe 80% of hotel booking sites listed are also affiliates, some of them very clever with the evidence hidden deep in the booking process - to uncover the link you more of less have to book a room. This is an example of how stretched editor resources compromise the credibility of DMOZ as a source of quality websites. Since more or less every travel/booking agency site is suspect it would make sense for DMOZ to take a stand and stop accepting submissions of such sites. Perhaps only accepting them into a single category staffed by expert editors in this particular area. Only if DMOZ starts to take such radical action can it hope to beat the affiliates and the potential for editor corruption in this area.
I agree affiliates are a big problem and always have been. I used to look around a lot of the Asia sites and saw problems everywhere. And I would post internally and externally (RZ) after I left when I ran across many such sites and usually they were taken care of. You're right that sometimes it's very difficult to spot these guys, but the frustrating thing for me was that many listings were not hard at all to see the affiliations. Many editors seemed not to put in even a minimal effort to look for these sites. However, once you know most of the major affiliations, it becomes a lot easier to spot those who are linked with them. Here's a trick I used to use to spot some that might have been hard to see otherwise. Using a dial-up connection, my usual for a while, if you looked at the status bar while the site was loading, you could often see the affiliated sites come into view, like planetholiday.com or asiarooms.com and many others. But using a broadband connection, it was very difficult to see the same as things whizzed by like lightning. Even after I knew the affiliations, it often took quite an effort to verify in the html or any other way, but at least I knew I caught 'em. Of course, at that point, you've supposed to see if these sites have any redeeming value at all and then act accordingly. Often there's not much left that's worthwhile especially if they're hotel reservations sites. The hotel rezzers are the worst imo and many or most agencies are little more than that.
Can you check this one too brizzie ? Travel Agents These are sites mostly listed by a Senior Editor with a Travel Affiliation.
AllPhilippineTravel.net - nothing obvious, no online booking. ARH Travel Corporation - nothing obvious, all links seem to be their own. Blue Horizons Travel & Tours, - FCm Travel Solutions partner but seems to offer its own services on top. Borderline. Butterfly Travel Philippines - nothing obvious, no online booking. Filipino Travel Center - nothing obvious, all links seem to be their own. Philippines Hotels and Resorts Reservation - dead Royal Vacations Travel and Tours - Bit weak but no sign of affiliate links. Travel International - nothing obvious, all links seem to be their own. Travel with Grace - Has nothing to do with Philippines, is based in Vegas, site is very sparse in real content and booking services are affiliates. Travelph.com - subsidiary of manilaforwarder.com - seems OK When you check them all Travel International and Travelph seem connected. See http://www.travelinternational.net/hotels/Makati/New_World/ and http://www.travelph.com/hotels/Makati/New_World/index.htm. If you dig into some inner pages there are almost identical page footers at times. But the whois records are totally different. At a guess travelinternational is the affiliate of travelph or possibly the two have collaborated via their joint membership of the same Southern California travel agency association. But who knows. That category isn't an easy one in terms of demonstrating affiliates. It is cleaner than most. When it comes to travel agents, they are all competing to offer the same flights and hotels. What makes them an affiliate is where the agency itself does no work, has no employees dealing with the customer making a booking via their website, taking their money, making the bookings, where the web site does all the work to pass the business directly to a third party automatically with no intervention. Apart from the dead link and the site offered by Travel with Grace the rest seem OK in that respect. Though I have serious doubts about Travel International and Travelph - viewed individually they would pass review but only when you scan the entire category, view them side by side, and do some deeplink checking do you spot things that don't seem quite right. That is a problem for editors who don't know the category intimately. When I edited in Queensland dealing with tourist sites I could pick up linked sites in completely different categories triggered by a shade of green in a header or the way the author would phrase a sentence - it was then a question of delving deeply to find the evidence of the link.
Blue Horizons Travel & Tours - I listed that. Thank You for taking the time. I'm just wondering the other listings since the SEO is from California and those listings has nothing to do there as you mentioned.
A tour operator does not have to be located in the country where it is listed provided it has a more or less exclusive focus on the country where it is listed. It can also be listed where it is located. So a California tour operator focusing exclusively on the Philippines can be listed in both places. This makes sense since a directory visitor may well look in the Philippines category if they wanted to visit there. A travel agent is generally only listed in its home locality in Regional. You have to make a distinction between tour operators and travel agents. Tour operators organise and run their own tours. Travel agents only provide booking services. I don't have the time to go back and look again in depth but Royal Vacations should be listed in Canada only, Travel with Grace is definitely wrong, Travel International is a US agent not a tour operator. Travelph has offices in both countries so could be listed in both, assuming it is not a plagiarist based on the evidence shown above. philippines-hotels.us/ is back - TravelMart affiliate. http://dmoz.org/guidelines/travel/ - gives the detailed travel guidelines.
I would not use any of them after a horrible experience I had with EXPEDIA. EXPEDIA ruined my trips and tried to keep (steal is the right word) the money for services that they failed to provide. Just search for "EXPEDIA complaints" in Google or Yahoo and you will read horrible stories from people that used EXPEDIA. Good luck
Here are a few problems I found in just a couple of minutes: 1. http://www.tourasia.com.hk/ is listed twice under Taiwan and HK TO's. They say they're an incoming TO but all of their tour links are "coming soon". Looks like mainly a hotel rez site but couldn't determine their affiliation. The HK desc. even shows their travel agent's license number. 2. http://www.hotelstaiwan.com/ is affiliated with and probably owned by hotelscentral.com 3. Sahakit Travel Service under http://dmoz.org/Regional/Asia/Thailand/Travel_and_Tourism/Travel_Services/Travel_Agents/ redirects to bangkok.com which is owned by asiawebdirect.com, one of those well-known consolidators of south east Asia. 4. http://www.skanditours.net/ appears to be an affiliate of several German travel sites including reisenthailand.com and http://www.thailandtravelhotel.com/
Listings in Travel http://travel-philippines.com/index.html - Not too much content and not updated. http://www.travelsmart.net/ - Affiliate site http://www.philippinetraveler.com/ - Copied content
Here is another one http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/sear...s/B/Boston/Travel_and_Tourism/Travel_Services The root URL should be listed once, probably in a national category. However, the root URL is up for sale on eBay and the affiliate links suggest to me that perhaps the RV rental business is some form of affiliate agency rather than an actual business. Either way, individual branches should not be listed and the Boston one is in the wrong category too.
http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_Amer...el_and_Tourism/Travel_Services/Travel_Agents/ GTA Travel is an onlineagency.com affiliate Underwood Travel Associates, Inc. is a resx.com affiliate branded Carson Wagonlit Crown Travel - deceptive index page. Click on a link and see the ads rather than content. Some other sites should be in the locality not the State level.
http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_Amer...ladelphia/Travel_and_Tourism/Travel_Services/ partyeloquence.com - nice words but all the services are affiliate links of one kind or another. One of the best wrappers for an affiliate site I have seen. Rusty's Travel has one holiday on the whole site and nothing else - unfortunately if you want the holiday you're a bit late - it was in 2002. That's an entire category (only 2 sites) http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_Amer...el_and_Tourism/Travel_Services/Travel_Agents/ Travel Enterprises - patheo.com affiliate Another entire category (only 1 site) http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_Amer...ittsburgh/Travel_and_Tourism/Travel_Services/ Discount Charter Vacations - mainly elnap.com affiliate but a vacationexpress one thrown in for good measure. 50% hit rate. The other site is actual a good model for a non-affiliate travel agent site and you can even verify it with an official source. http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/Hawaii/Travel_and_Tourism/ Ooh, perhaps another day... This is an easy game - pick a US city with travel agents listed and you can't fail to nail some... Anyone else want a go - http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/sear...TF-8&cat=Regional/North_America/United_States BTW http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/Nebraska/Travel_and_Tourism/Travel_Agents/ is off template - should be under a Travel Services cat. But it only has an @link which leads to the State top page.
May be not everybody can sell DMOZ listings like "senior" editors can in SEO project disguise and they need to make money by affiliate links. On the other hand the "senior" editors are on constant guard for their corruption gravy train, so it won't be surprising that these are another sideline business that results from their "volunteer" work. It makes you wonder if there is any category in DMOZ which is not corrupt to the core with possible exception of casserole cooking recipes. May be next year they can add a new editor prize category: The Most Corrupt Editor. It will be a tough competition among different Metas and Admins.
Since I have heard from some Metas that they know about corruption but they can not do anything about it, it is quite obvious that the protection for corrupt editors must be in Admin or staff level of DMOZ. Abuse report system will probably only helps to find out the illegal passengers on the corruption gravy train who do not have a ticket or possibly to ask them to buy a ticket from "senior" editors if they want to stay on the train.
And what about legitimate travel agencies? Why should they be penalised for the affiliates? And whilst we are on the subject, DMOZ is not so great! Having submitted a few GENUINE travel sites to DMOZ and knowing that they have been looked at by editors, they have NOT been listed. Ok thats fine, their choice, but for genuine, unique listings doesnt this make DMOZ a complete farce? For a directory\search engine to carry on this way simply ridiculous and devalues their integrity considerably!
You might be right, you might be wrong. If travel sites are a target for corrupt editors, and I have to admit that the sheer quantity means that it would be easy for an editor to hide a few amongst the rest, then systematically identifying them and noting whether they are eliminated from the directory is something everyone can do about it. Dig them out and list them here. If there is nothing sinister involved then it is doing a quality control service to DMOZ, if there is then someone will lose a slice of ill-gotten gains. Win-win.
They are already being heavily penalised, lost in a heap of affiliate spam listings and submissions. You would have to provide the URLs for the first part of that statement to be verified. Second, you don't know whether an editor looked at the sites with the idea of reviewing them, or in a spam sifting exercise, or to move them, etc. i.e. they could still be waiting for review. Unlike gworld's paranoid every editor is corrupt approach I would guess that the current problem with travel sites is a quality control problem that has been built up over years, many of the sites having been switched to affiliate status after a genuine version was listed. It isn't ridiculous because it isn't deliberate, but the travel site issue does detract from the integrity of the directory, I agree. Unfortunately editor resources are (too) restricted to be able to deal with all of the quality control issues that impact on DMOZ. And this will only get worse as time goes on unless its management gets to grips with things.
You have been in the DMOZ and you have seen, how some editors will stay on as editor no matter what. What is your honest opinion about this, notice I said your opinion, can this situation exist without the support of some Admins or staffs?