**Important Policy Announcement**

September 20, 2010--Important policy changes were made by the TTPC Board at its meeting of June 18, 2010. A summary of these policy changes can be found here. These policy changes are now in effect.

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The Travel Partnership Corporation (TTPC), a Washington D.C. 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 eligibility to register 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.

As the sponsor of .travel TLD, TTPC has instituted systems to develop and enforce standards, policies, procedures and practices with respect to the sTLD by;

• publishing such standards, policies, procedures and practices so they are available to members of the sTLD community;

• conducting its policy-development activities in a manner that reasonably provides opportunities for members of the sTLD community to discuss and participate in the development of such standards, policies, procedures, or practices; and

• maintaining the representativeness of its policy-development and implementation process by establishing procedures that facilitate participation by a broad cross-section of the sTLD community.

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 5% of total global economic output, 10% of international trade and leads all online transactions at 28% of the total.