TCD: travel's bottom line

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2010

IF THIS IS your first experience of TravelConsumerDaily.com, welcome. If you’re returning to the website after its brief iteration last year, welcome back. 

TCD had a false start in August 2009, when it had to be suspended due to health issues being experienced by publisher Clive Dorman. Dorman is now fit after a month of recuperation and nearly five months of planning and recalibration of the website’s mission through the Christmas-New Year period.

So TCD looks little like it did last year. Most of the content is more readily accessible online, instead of in PDF format, an experiment that was mainly a protest against the same-saminess of most web formats, where everything is small, and also against the disgraceful technical incompetence of Web technology, which is generally primitive and stupid.

The unscheduled extra months of planning have enabled us to hone the absolute essentials of why we exist: if you’re a traveller, our job is to be your eyes and ears on all the important stuff – the cost of things and consumer issues like airline behaviour in all matters to do with customers. There is no website like it in the world, but, from our Australian base, we have staked out the Asia-Pacific (the world’s busiest region for air travel) as our home turf, though we will report on issues affecting travellers everywhere.

We would like one of the markers of the website to be a unique set of features you can’t find anywhere else, like the TCD Best Fares Guide, which you can click on from the homepage. As it explains, the best fares guide will evolve over coming months to include samples of the going rate you can expect to pay on all routes into, out of and around the Asia-Pacific region. Look out for other new information features that will be "bolted on" to the site in the coming months.

As the About Us page explains, publisher Clive Dorman is an expert in the consumer travel field and loves his beat. Apart from his continuing work with Australia’s Fairfax media, as a travel news feature writer and blogger, TCD is a new and exclusive online source for Dorman’s specialisation and new work by others as well. Our objective is to make TCD a source you shouldn’t leave home without consulting.

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