How do I validate an idea in my marketplace for the industry?

Before you spend $ or time marketing your service / website, ensure that your brand itself is quite strong. For example, if your name or domain is awkward, ambiguous, or off-putting, then every dollar and hour you spend promoting your brand will work less efficiently in your favor than if you were spending the same amount of money and time marketing something more robust and attractive.

That one question entails several separate answers. .TRAVEL is little used and practically unknown to the general public, even though it has been around for 7 or 8 years. Partly that's because the .TRAVEL registry mandates a special application process that confines use of the extension to particular kinds of entities. Have you ever visited a .TRAVEL website? Most people have never seen one. And so, with negligible public adoption of .TRAVEL, you'd find yourself almost entirely alone explaining your name / web address over and over again. Names that require long explanations are cumbersome and forgettable. There's an added burden with vanity extensions such as .TRAVEL. Suppose you name your company or website "Exotic Travel". If you use Exotic.Travel because ExoticTravel.com is too expensive or else in use already, then you will either face a competitor who uses ExoticTravel.com or else you will need to purchase and maintain both domains. Owning a vanity extension without a matching .COM is almost always a bad idea. Some major websites have learned that the hard way -- often paying 5 or 6 figures to acquire the .COM domain they hoped to circumvent. I'm not a .COM purist. In fact, I'm fond of some domains in vanity extensions. But they should be used as a pair with the .COM most of the time. .ORG can be ideal for certain kinds of projects. But it's impossible for me to give an answer without knowing the name in question. If .ORG is part of the brand identity -- meaning that you're proud to display the .ORG -- then it can work. Nonprofits are especially well suited to .ORG for this reason, as are some other websites. However, if using the .ORG is merely a cheap knockoff of your first-choice domain, then people will perceive it rightly as just a cheap knockoff. We'd have to discuss the name specifically for me to give any meaningful feedback, though. Of course, you began by saying "there are no quality .COMs available". Frankly, that's probably not true. Availability comes in all shapes and sizes. It's certainly the case that most of the good .COM domains already belong to somebody. After all, the internet has been around for a few decades. Just as with the North American continent, every vacant lot has an owner by now. But many good .COMs, though owned, are nevertheless not in use -- and therefore available, depending on your budget. It's dangerous to settle for the first .COM you find that's available for $10. Almost by definition, those are precisely the domains that have interested nobody alive at all for 20+ years. However, I've been exploring the name space every single day full time for some years now -- often for myself but frequently for clients. And a small percentage of good domains do remain available. However, it takes experience to find them and tell the difference between fool's gold and the genuine article. With my last naming client, I'd say that less than 1% of my name ideas were unregistered. That's a long answer. Since it's now 1:17 a.m., I'd better cut things off at this point!

Hi, I've got years of experience in sales and small business management. While not travel-focused, I may be able to help. Why are you so focused on a direct-sales approach? I know travel agents that frequently sell adventure travel products for operators. Have you properly analyzed all the sales channels available to you? Agents have relationships with frequent adventurers who rely on their input when making travel decisions. If agents aren't part of your sales efforts, is it because your margins aren't correct? Are you trying to fix a sales problem with a marketing solution? Let me know if you'd like to book a call. Dave.

You'll need to learn more about, and better define your two personas: A) The type of company willing to pay for t-shirt based advertising B) The type of person that will to wear it. To do this you'll need to access communities where you think those personas would hang out (either online, or in person), and ask them questions (via an online questionnaire, or in an in person interview) that will allow you to characterize the types of people / companies that would be interested. Once you have your two well defined personas you can better design and test your initial service around them. For instance, maybe you've realized through your research that only bars are interested in your service, and maybe they're only interested in women wearing their advertisements. Meanwhile you might have also found that only men would be interested in wearing the advertisement shirts. In this case the idea would not be viable. However if you find personas that do match, and there are enough of them in existance (big enough market), and/or they're interested in paying enough $ (enough to pay for the t-shirts, and your rent, and cleaning, and occasional lost shirts, etc.), then it would be viable. Not _necessarily_ the next big thing, but definitely viable. Let me know if you'd like more detailed advice with regard to conducting interviews, designing questionnaires, how to access potential customers, or even if you'd just like to brainstorm on it some more. It's a fun idea, best, Lee

That's a much more complicated question than it appears to be, as there are multiple sources which will get you some of the inventory, but nothing which will get you all of the inventory. If you look at an OTA, they are pulling from typical sources like SABRE or Amadeus, but also from what is in effect their own inventory, where hotels are either going in via an extranet or there's some kind of direct-connect to the system the hotel is operating on (which could be one of many, including none at all). In fact, some of the OTA's make that proprietary inventory available too, via an API and on a commissionable sales basis. There's just no one-size-fits-all access point - especially when you consider that worldwide the hotel business is actually very un-aggregated with something like 80% of all hotel room capacity operated independently (that is to say, not branded or part of a chain like Starwood, Accor, IHG etc.). It's a big part of why OTA's have invested so heavily in technology to manage and distribute this type of inventory. It's not easily done as the technology used in the hospitality industry is often not great and it's unconsolidated to there's value and negotiating strength to be brought from consolidating it.