The National Limousine Association has secured a special agreement with Enterprise GPS to offer NLA members an exclusive 10% discount on the company’s state-of-the-art tracking equipment.  Additional discounting (such as free activation, shipping, etc.) also will be made available when Enterprise GPS is running a promotion that exceeds the standard NLA member discount.  NLA members must present the promotion code NLA2010 and their NLA member number to be eligible for the members-only discount.  Enterprise GPS, headquartered in Tustin, Calif., has been a supplier member of the National Limousine Association since 2008.  For more information, see www.EnterpriseGPS.com and/or call (888) 400-4771. 

With the addition of Enterprise GPS, the National Limousine Association now makes 20 discount/savings programs available to NLA members.  And more are coming soon!   See www.limo.org for full details.

The 2010 LCT Leadership Summit will be held on September 28-30 at the Fairmont Chicago Millennium Park Hotel in Chicago.  In its eighth year, the Summit has been the industry’s only intimate forum that focuses exclusively on the changing trends of the chauffeured transportation industry.  As a bonus, a special guided tour of the BusCon Expo, being held on the same dates at Chicago’s famous Navy Pier, will be included for Summit attendees.  See www.lctsummit.com for program details and registration information.

In Travel and Tourism Works for America 2010, the U.S. Travel Association reports “More than 93 million American adults used the Internet to plan their travel in 2009…Seventy-six million online travel planners booked their trips on the Internet, and almost half of them spent $1,000 or more on travel services or products per year.  The most prevalent tools used for online travel planning included online travel agency websites, search engines, company websites and destination websites.  Online travelers consider the Internet their dominant source for travel information (although ‘previous experience’ and ‘word-of-mouth’ also ranked highly as sources), while fewer than one in five online travel planners reported using guidebooks, brochures or magazines and newspapers.”

The U.S. Travel Association, in this same publication, also lists the top origin markets for international travel to the U.S. in 2009, specifically:  1) Canada, 2)  Mexico, 3) United Kingdom, 4) Japan, 5) Germany 6) France, 7) Brazil, 8) Italy, 9) South Korea, and 10) Australia.  “'While international visitors to the U.S. account for about 3% of total U.S. travel, they represent as much as 13% of our travel-related spending,’ says Bruce Bommarito, executive vice president and chief operating officer of U.S. Travel…Visitors to the U.S. overall spend more than domestic travelers on their travels, on average $2,200 when they visit.  And travel and tourism is the largest services sector export of the entire U.S. economy.  It accounts for 8% of all U.S. exports (and 25% of services sector exports) and continues to make an outsized contribution to growth in trade, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.”