Governor Erlich Presents BBB Torch Award to Travel Advantage Network

Bad grammar and spelling in e-mail garble meaning, tarnish companies

by Jeremy Bond Special to The Gazette
June 3, 2005

Fran Simon made a startling discovery when she headed the customer service division of a company that serves educators.

"That department didn't have the highest level of writing skills," she said, in apparent understatement.

Poorly written e-mail messages were acute problems at Teaching Strategies, a Washington, D.C., publishing and training company for early childhood programs. Messages that went out to teachers and school administrators sometimes had poor grammar and misspellings, said Simon, who has since moved on to direct technology initiatives for the company.

So, about three years ago, Simon sought out a Silver Spring company, E-Write, that provides training for businesses and organizations seeking to improve writing in e-mail and other electronic communication. The entire staff at Teaching Strategies attended a session by E-Write co-founders Marilynne Rudick and Leslie O'Flahavan that engaged everyone, from Ph.D.s to those who never graduated from college, Simon recalled.

Rudick and O'Flahavan founded E-Write in 1996 in part because e-mail had become such a fundamental practice, O'Flahavan said. The challenge has been convincing business leaders that poorly written e-mail communication is bad for business.

"They don't seem to think that it matters to the client," Rudick said. But "it just makes the company look unprofessional and sloppy." A message with errors can sometimes lead a client to conclude that a company or organization does not conduct business well. "It's kind of like going to an interview with stains on your shirt," Rudick said. "It's the way you present yourself."

Rudick and O'Flahavan wrote a book on the subject, "Clear, Correct, Concise E-Mail: A Writing Workbook for Customer Service Agents." They teach courses in e-mail and Web writing as well as in the etiquette and practical aspects of e-mail, such as whether to forward a message without permission and when to reply to a message with the history of all prior related messages.

The co-founders have spoken at conferences and have written about a variety of related issues. MailerMailer, a Rockville company that helps clients manage e-mail lists and create targeted e-mails, has published columns in its newsletter from Rudick and O'Flahavan on writing for global customers.

Ten or 15 years ago, when people began using e-mail as a business application, they used it for only informal writing. In 1996, the impression was still that "serious" communication would have to be written on paper, O'Flahavan said. And if it was on paper, it was usually proofread. But electronic communication is sent quickly and does not get an extra set of eyes, so mistakes are more likely.

Robin Jones Consulting, a marketing company in Frederick, always has people other than the writer review and edit e-mail messages that go out to clients, said public relations head Ellie Whims. She makes the same suggestion to clients about their own e-mail communication.

"Everything you say is a reflection of your business and should be in line with your company's messaging," she said. "It's critical to make sure it's perfect." Whims suggested that e-mail messages be reviewed first for content, to make sure the purpose of the message is coming through. A second read would focus on potential technical errors.

"Technology has a coolness factor that tends to blind people to what it's all about, and that's communication," said John A. Morris, manager of Baltimore County's Web Services Group, an E-Write client. The loose manner in which e-mail is written and sent has meant people have to be retrained on the basics of writing, he said.

E-mail is so ubiquitous that the business community no longer relies on secretaries to take care of all the written communication, Rudick said. Today people with a wide range of writing skills, good and bad, are representing their businesses.

"We're faced with so much more writing than we ever were," O'Flahavan said.

People in customer service, for example, which is often for entry-level employees, are suddenly thrust into a position that requires good writing whether or not they have a writing background. Most people who work in contact centers, which handle written communications for customer service, are much more accustomed to conducting business over the telephone, said Rhonda C. Proctor, editor of Contact Professional magazine based in Birmingham, Ala.

Clint Kendrick, who took a seminar from O'Flahavan at a conference a few years ago, said it is easier for customer service agents to express the wrong tone through e-mail than over the phone. For example, adding a phrase such as, "If there's anything more I can do" helps a lot, he said.

"People are a lot more forgiving of spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes than things that are too harsh, or not personalized enough," said Kendrick, director of client services at Who's Calling in Kirkland, Wash., where O'Flahavan plans to present a seminar later this month.

Many companies that manage customer relationships now have e-mail management divisions, Proctor said. Virtually every company has tried to brand itself, and e-mail is one way to do that. "They see e-mail communication as a critical aspect of all communication," she said.

Choice Hotels, a Silver Spring hospitality company, assures that its e-mail looks professional by requiring all external messages to go through the corporate communications department, spokesman Darryl Carr said. The department edits messages for content and spelling and grammatical errors.

While Choice has no written guidelines for messages sent within the company, any messages sent company-wide to all 300 employees also must go through corporate communications, Carr said.

When discussing the quality of e-mail communication, Rudick and O'Flahavan distinguish between big-picture skills, such as writing a message in an order that is easy to understand, and little-picture skills, such as getting all the spelling and grammar correct.

Big-picture skills are more important and have a greater impact on successful writing, O'Flahavan said. An e-mail message between a boss and a subordinate, for example, should first say what is wanted and then why it is wanted. "I love correctness, but people can still understand what you say if you make one occasional small-picture mistake," she said.

The big picture is best represented in an e-mail subject line, which should indicate why the recipient should read the e-mail. But many people in business do not include a subject or choose one arbitrarily, O'Flahavan said. "An e-mail kind of lives and dies on a good subject line," she said.

Quality e-mail writing is trickier for companies that send out e-mail messages en masse. Canned responses are necessary for efficiency but also have to be tailored to specific people, said Marie Watkins, a client services manager for the Travel Advantage Network in Millersville in Anne Arundel County. The travel agency also was an E-Write client.

Sodexho USA, the food and facilities management company headquartered in Gaithersburg, does not release external mass e-mails because it communicates with clients directly, spokeswoman Leslie Aun said. A couple of years ago, however, the company launched a campaign to spread tips about good e-mail practices within Sodexho: for example, avoiding the use of fancy graphics that would be indecipherable to those accessing e-mail on a Blackberry.

O'Flahavan suggested that using poor e-mail behavior in even internal, informal messages is a bad habit to get into. "That's like being cranky to your family and polite to your dinner guests," O'Flahavan said. And small-picture mistakes in the body of any e-mail usually stand out, she said. Much business communication has apostrophes where they do not belong, such as in the word "its," run-on sentences and the misuse of look-alike and sound-alike words.

"I decry what is going on in American business," said Santo J. Aurelio, author of "How to Say It and Write It Correctly Now." Business leaders often "don't realize that a sentence means there must be a subject and a predicate. They have got to be motivated to change. And they've got to know they don't know how to write," said Aurelio, who has taught composition and other courses at colleges in the Boston area. "When one writes in such a sophomoric way, I don't know how they will sell what they need to sell," he said.

Aurelio was a longtime court reporter who used shorthand as part of his job, but said that e-mail has gotten the business world too used to using abbreviations and lower-case letters. "All these things militate against good grammar usage and punctuation," he said. Weak spellers can avoid mistakes just by knowing where their problems are, O'Flahavan said. She believes writing is a skill that can be learned and not one that people inherently have or do not have.

"Everything we teach about writing well, people probably know it at some level," she said. "People need to work those writing muscles, just like they need to work physical muscles." In many cases, people are simply in a hurry. Rudick recalled a copy editor who sent her an e-mail message in all lower case and with no punctuation. Being in the editing field, that person obviously knew better, she said. "Presenting your ideas in writing is such a basic skill," Rudick said. "Because how else do you present your ideas?"

April 2005

Developments

Professional Journal of the American Resort Development Association
trends section

by Kelly Leso Manager, Public Relations & Marketing Communications, Travel Advantage Network

“Togethering” is a term that began appearing in the media in mid-2003 and has been adopted by vacationers and vacation owners alike. In simple terms, this travel trend is the resurgence of extended family vacations and travel with other families.

Surveys conducted by American Express and the Travel Industry Association of America endorse this trend and state multigenerational travel is one of the fastest growing areas of the travel industry, with more than 5 million family vacations that include three generations each year.

Togethering has also become popular with specific groups, as Web sites and associations cater more and more to women and to the gay and lesbian communities. Women Traveling Together, for instance, has typical group sizes of 10 to 20 travelers. Tour members range in age from the mid-30s to late 60s; about 30 percent are married.

Researchers say that this trend could be the result of many things. “Togethering is likely to become more popular in the future because of the growing importance of family in our post-9/11 culture," said Dennis Marzella, executive vice president and director of research for Yesawich’s travel services marketing firm Yesawich, Pepperdine, Brown & Russell (YPB&R). "The survey data clearly support this: fully 37% of adults told us they were planning to take more of such trips in the years ahead." Another school of thought is that vacationers are cashing in on the “wholesale” prices of traveling in groups.

"Today there is a new trend, and we call that trend togethering: getting together to renew our relationships with friends and family,” said industry expert Peter Yesawich (YPB&R), who claims to have coined the term. An August 2003 survey of 1,655 active leisure travelers, authored by Yesawich’s firm, predicts the trend will continue to gain momentum as busy families seek additional leisure time and experiences together. When questioned about vacation alternatives, survey respondents cited:

• 69% consider spending time with family as very or extremely important in 2003 (up from 57% in 2000)
• 54% spend time with friends (up from 43% in 2000)
• 35% of adult leisure travelers took at least one vacation with children during the previous year (up from 26% in 2000)

Of these multi-household leisure trips with extended family:

• 68% were with friends
• 46% traveled with other families
• the average number of people traveling in the party was just over 7
• 26% of such trips included 8 or more people
• 4 out of 10 adults organize group dining events and a comparable percentage plan group recreational events (TAN receives countless numbers of completed surveys from TAN-ners telling us the most enjoyable part of their vacation was being able to cook and dine with their family in their vacation condo.)

Where do people travel together? Slightly over half of survey respondents (51%) identified Florida as the best destination for multi-household leisure trips, two-thirds of which stated they were interested in visiting Walt Disney World. Florida’s popularity was followed by California (35%) and Hawaii (26%).

Yet another travel industry forecast predicts an increase in togethering: the report was issued as a joint-effort by the new Center for Hospitality and Tourism Research at San Diego State University (CHTR) and the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau (ConVis). The following is an excerpt, edited for brevity only, of this report:

Whatever the reasoning behind this trend, we at TAN are smiling because we have always provided convenient, plentiful accommodations at wholesale prices. It has been our mission since Day One: March 20, 1992.

By now, most of our Travelers are familiar with the quality accommodations TAN provides. Our desTANations have always been family/group oriented, from Myrtle Beach, SC, to Orlando, FL, and growing. Gift certificates and the option to allow friends and family to use your weeks also adds to the appeal of the TAN program. What better way to celebrate the close ties to family and friends than to create a yearly tradition of traveling together, to a TAN home away from home for a week (or two)?

So, whether you are realizing the benefits of group vacationing for the first time or in the midst of your 40th family vacation, rest assured that TAN will do its best to accommodate all your vacationing needs.

Sources:
American Express
Center for Hospitality and Tourism Research at San Diego State University (CHTR)
Q-web.com
San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau (ConVis)
Travel Industry Association of America
Women Traveling Together
Yesawich, Pepperdine, Brown & Russell

Travel agency works hard to play hard

By WENDI WINTERS, For The Capital
April 11, 2005

Even in the dead of winter, Brad Callahan, 39, had a light golden tan. It was the perfect advertisement for his company, Travel Advantage Network, known by its acronym, TAN.

On a recent Friday, he was hotfootin' it out of the office a little early.

The Crownsville resident was jetting to Park City in the Rockies on a business trip that included an afternoon of bobsledding in Olympic Park.

"I always find some way to have a new experience when I travel," he said. "I'll start my day at 5 or 6 a.m. just to free up several hours in the afternoon."

Mr. Callahan averages three "no-work" vacation weeks a year and another 18 to 20 trips with business involved.

Divorced, with joint custody of a 9-year old daughter, Victoria, Mr. Callahan schedules his jaunts the weeks the youngster is not with him. Once a month, he gets together for some adventures with long-time pals _ bungee jumping, sky-diving and white water rafting have been on the agenda.

Occasionally he heads to a beach house in North Carolina with his extended clan.

TAN's business is selling condominium vacation programs. The privately held company is a wholesale-priced condominium network with 11 affiliated sales offices in the United States selling its product. Its tall, athletic founder is probably its most enthusiastic customer.

The company grossed $16 million last year in sales, with an average transaction of $350. TAN makes its money on usage fees.

The company, said Mr. Callahan, has experienced double-digit increases the past five years in its client base and number of vacations taken.

"It's nice, steady, manageable growth," he said.

It's really in the business of getting people to relax without feeling their pockets are being picked. The company offers a large, growing portfolio of condominium vacation options at what Mr. Callahan calls "Sam's Club prices."

In a nutshell, a client purchases 10 or 20 vacation weeks in TAN vacation condos located in almost 25 states. The company "banks" the vacations, which the client can use anytime.

The temptation to use them is great as TAN condos are seemingly nearby anyplace in the United States., Mexico, and outlying islands that offers sand, snow or sun in plentiful amounts. Clients hail from all 50 states, and the company serviced its 50,000th new account in January.

The company gets rid of vacation time in under used condos through a novel program called Excess Inventory. A weeks stay in a condo can go as low at $90 and isn't deducted from the banked vacation weeks the customer has already paid for.

"I got a phone call from a company in Columbus," said customer Doug Amtsberg of Columbus, a computer programmer/manager and teacher. "In their presentation, they laid out the program. It sounded like it would be good for us."

In the program three years this May, he and his family will use the fourth scheduled week next month and has taken advantage of the excess program several times.

In quick order he rattled off vacations spent at Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head, South Carolina; the Poconos; Gatlinburg, Tennessee; Gulf Shores, Alabama; Sedona and Scottsdale, Arizona; White Mountains, New Hampshire; and Wisconsin Dell, Wisconsin. Some places Mr. Amtsberg or his family has visited more than once.

"The only negative," Mr. Amtsberg said, "at the end of 20 weeks, I own nothing."

Office life

TAN's current headquarters is located in an undistinguished storefront at Old Mill Plaza in Millersville.

When the company first started in '92, with a partner (bought out in 97) and two employees, it was housed in a cramped truck warehouse space in Arbutus. The company is actively looking for more office space, and is willing to purchase an office building in the county.

"They're getting snapped up," Mr. Callahan sighed.

TAN has 45 employees in Millersville and can squeeze another five or six in before the space explodes. Other employees are located in several properties, including about 70 full and part-time employees at its second hotel, the Hawaiian Hotel Molokai. The company also has dozens of independent contractors.

Once a vacation sales firm, in 1997 Mr. Callahan changed the business model to have individual sales affiliates.

"I dove into the service side. Having properties meant regular maintenance and upgrade schedules, management tracking on sales," he said. "We turned the service and fulfillment side into a science. I'm constantly pushing the team for better ideas to be enhance the overall customer experience."

That's how Excess Inventory, last minute vacation opportunities, evolved. Now at precisely 3 p.m. each Friday, an e-mail goes out to its 50,000-plus members announcing rock bottom rates on condos beginning the following weekend.

Immediately, the phone lines start ringing.

TAN, itself, is not one company but, according to Mr. Callahan, "a ton of separate companies."

Every single condominium unit and every affiliated venture is a separate limited liability corporation, requiring its own tax returns and accounting.

The move, while generating reams of paperwork, protects his personal assets and provides separate liability protection for each property.

"Only my lawyer and accountant know for sure how many I own," he grinned. "The tax returns are ridiculous."

What is not ridiculous is the company's reputation for social service _ and some of the stunts Mr. Callahan or the employees have pulled off in pursuit of their lofty fund-raising goals.

"Most of our social service is done on company time," Mr. Callahan said. "Every manager is required to get involved in an outside organization. Five or six years ago, I was always looking for the best practices and decided to get the employees involved."

A member of the Young Presidents Organization, he spent New Years in New Zealand with the group, and an active board member of two institutions, Anne Arundel County Partners In Excellence and Father Charles Hall Catholic School in Baltimore, he's also set up a charitable trust to donate condo weeks and rental income to area charities.

Each month, an employee sponsors a charity. A weekly bingo game might bring in the proceeds the employee needs to reach a goal.

They also raise funds with bake sales and wacky "pay to throw pies at managers" opportunities, in-house consignment shops, water balloon challenges, penny wars and other creative methods.

Jennie Thompson, TAN's vacation fulfillment manager said, one month, she wanted to set the company goal for the most money raised.

"At the end of the month, I was $80 short."

She announced she was willing to shave her head for $80.

"I gave her $100 and shaved her head," Mr. Callahan chuckled.

More than two dozen area and national charities have benefited from similar nutty stunts the employees dream up.

That's the serious stuff. The company also has a "Fun Committee" with straight-faced rules on having fun.

"Things to keep people stimulated and having fun," said Mr. Callahan, ignoring jibes from his staff about a "memorable" company outing to Jillian's at Arundel Mills.

Something about a food fight. They can't return to the restaurant unless they're incognito.

"The employees really make this thing run," said Mr. Callahan. "Not one or two people. Everybody steps up and everybody pitches. It's been a good turn of events the last few years. I really enjoy things. It's come down to the people. Well even hire people and find a position for them."

Wendi Winters is a freelance writer living on the Broadneck Peninsula.

Published April 10, 2005, The Capital, Annapolis, Md.

Hotel Molokai owner awards free trip

The condo vacation company Travel Advantage Network has surpassed 50,000 active accounts, and is celebrating by sending Elizabeth Hamilton and her husband to Hawaii.
"That's great! My husband and I were talking about wanting to go to Hawaii just a few weeks ago," said Hamilton, the 50,000th customer for Travel Advantage, which is based in Millersville, Md., east of Washington, D.C.

The Hamiltons, who live in Ohio, will be going to the Friendly Isle, where Travel Advantage is the new owner of the Hotel Molokai.

"We manage more than 500 properties in 20 states, from Maine to Hawaii, as well as Mexico and the Caribbean," said Brad Callahan, who owns the company. "These accounts represent over 200,000 travelers vacationing with us."

Travel Advantage is the time-share equivalent of a discount airline, pricing condo vacations at wholesale levels.