The International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association has been questioned about why they are seeking to charge their own members $95 to obtain an LGBT market report which they co-sponsored, and which is apparently available free-of-charge to any member of the general public.
Ian Johnson
March 19, 2012
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IGLTA: "The Benefits Of Membership?"
Last month, a member of the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association (IGLTA), Mr Rick Hurlbut, wondered aloud on Facebook why IGLTA members like him were being asked to pay $95 for a copy of a report which is available as a free PDF download on the United Nations World Tourism Organization affiliates website.
Mr Hurlbut told Gay Market News he had spotted this PDF download online, while reviewing the UNWTO affiliates pages for himself.
Rick runs a number of Groups on Facebook - and so posed this question in a Facebook posting on his "GLBT Travel & Tourism" page at the start of February 2012:
"IGLTA members should question why the association is charging for a report which appears to be available for free."
Last Friday, the CEO of IGLTA - Mr John Tanzella - responded that Rick was not engaging in an "accurate public discussion" on the matter. Mr Tanzella wrote:
"Hi Rick, sorry you didn't check with IGLTA first to get the answer on this. The difference is that we are selling the 40 page PRINTED brochure, not an online pdf. IGLTA pays $3K usd yearly to be a member of the UN WTO (it's not free) so our membership is at the global table. The document was very expensive to print in Spain, then ship the boxes to Florida. Then we have to pay to mail these to potentially 88 countries around the world (our membership). Hope this helps you understand that this is not a profit center for iglta, it will barely cover costs of printing and shipping. Thank you."
In a follow-up remark last week Mr Tanzella wrote:
"Rick, contacting IGLTA in advance would have resulted in an accurate public discussion. You would have been been (sic) advised that the pdf version is a propitiatory (sic) platform of the UN, not of IGLTA. We co-sponsored the study and had to take on the cost of printing 1,000 of the 40-page documents then ship the many boxes from Spain to Florida. Then the cost to ship these to members in potentially 88 countries is highly expensive. Thank you."
Well, interestingly the facts seem to support Mr Hurlbut's raising of his original concerns.
Another - now lapsed - former IGLTA member called Roy Heale added perhaps the most prescient comments in the whole sorry saga when he wrote last week on Facebook:
"The benefits of membership?"
Seems rather a fair question to be asked.
Here is my opinion on the facts as we know them.
I think John Tanzella's response almost entirely misses the point of Rick Hurlbut's initial complaint.
Rick was mainly asking whether IGLTA had informed their membership they could download the UNWTO travel report as a PDF for free. In fact any member of the public can do so. It is indeed fully available - right now - for free public download via the UNWTO affiliates public web page.
If IGLTA members are able to access the UN report at no charge elsewhere, then why shouldn't they? If IGLTA knows this to be possible but prefers to try to charge their own members $95 for the report, why should the resulting disillusionment among its own members towards IGLTA management's approach cause any great surprise?
I have heard other IGLTA members raise this same issue in conversations in recent weeks - so I know Rick Hurlbut is by no means alone in his concerns.
I think this discussion quite sadly reflects something bigger that is going on, and that is that there has for some years now been a gradual decoupling of IGLTA management from the interests of its own traditional LGBT business-owning membership base. As an organisation, if you lose the continuing support of your core constituency - which in the case of the IGLTA means their LGBT business-owning original base - it is quite possible to risk losing your very reason to exist as a result.
The IGLTA is a member-based trade association. As such all monies spent are actually funds that the management of the association manages only on trust - on behalf of its own members.
When members see IGLTA management take decisions (for example, such as joining UNWTO - paid for out of members' own funds; and then choosing to publish this report) members see these as actions undertaken by an organization which they, the members, believe is meant to be always 'working' on their behalf, namely - using members' own monies to advance members' interests.
For members to find they are now asked to pay extra for the outcomes of these actions is something some members do not like - especially when they then discover it involves paying IGLTA $95 for a report which any member of the public can freely obtain - at no charge - elsewhere.
No individual member of course actually 'voted' for any of these actions. They were decisions taken by IGLTA management - supposedly made as decisions taken solely to advance the interests of IGLTA members.
One obvious question arises, why were printing and any other costs for this report not already fully covered - for example by one-off corporate sponsorship/s of all costs of the report project - long before any decision was greenlighted by IGLTA management to print that many copies of a 40 page document? (Actually, NYC and Company are credited in the fine print at the front of the report "for sponsoring the printing of this report", so the stated need to have to charge IGLTA members $95 to obtain a printed copy of the report looks even less compelling.)
The complete costs of this exercise ought to have been fully budgeted for well in advance by IGLTA management before they decided to proceed with the project, much less agreed to publish 1000 copies of such a document. If the organisation could not afford to print these, then they ought never have been printed - much less then being shipped halfway across the world. (Are there no printers in Florida near IGLTA HQ that could do the job?)
In any case, the decision to go ahead and publish, then to ship, so many copies (1000) of a printed version of this UN report - if made by IGLTA management on the basis that unless IGLTA now manages to sell a certain minimum number of copies, then the association will actually lose members' funds as a result of the whole project - starts to look like poor project management.
No minimum sale of such reports could ever safely be assumed with any certainty from the outset, and even more so now - given that this report has for weeks been freely available to any member of the public, to receive direct from the UNWTO, at no charge - without any requirement to be an IGLTA member.
Another question could be: in this day of customised digital printing, why risk members' funds at all on a purely speculative hope that IGLTA might actually sell so many copies?
Modern print-on-demand services allow for physical copies of reports to be printed only when actually ordered and paid for, and then shipped out individually - priced suitably to cover all resulting costs. That approach to printing copies of the report could have been done at zero risk to the association, and with no resulting loss of members' own funds.
So it certainly seems arguable then that better forward-planning by IGLTA management could have prevented this whole situation ever arising in the first place.
Finally, while IGLTA management might think - as John Tanzella claims - that membership of UNWTO somehow benefits IGLTA members with their own seat "at the global table", a question must then be raised in response to such a statement: how?
In practical terms, what tangible benefits have any individual members actually received from this decision by management of IGLTA to join the UNWTO? None that I can see - unless you count being asked to pay $95 for a free UNWTO report that many members feel ought to be included as part of their membership - not something they are asked to pay again for.
There is a feeling that somehow joining UNWTO may be perceived to manufacture prestige (which might possibly be true for IGLTA's management) - but with no tangible benefits at all actually flowing to individual IGLTA members, each of whom presumably made the decision to spend their funds to join the association hoping to receive actual and tangible benefit to their own business's bottom line as a result.
IGLTA management is meant to be answerable to and report to the membership - and to be directly accountable to the concerns expressed by members like Rick Hurlbut. It is not good enough to try to close down such a conversation by suggesting he was not being "accurate" in this discussion.
One thing is certain - Rick is, from what I can observe, usually quite meticulous on detail - and I cannot actually spot any inaccurate statements made by him on this issue. None.
The report was, and is, freely available to members of the public at no charge via the UNWTO website - and IGLTA was, and is, trying to charge its own members $95 to receive a copy of the same document. It also reportedly appears to be trying to keep knowledge of the availability of a free online download of that document secret from its own members.
So we are left with a report, that had some or all of its printing costs paid for by a corporate sponsor, that IGLTA management knows is actually available for anyone to access free of charge elsewhere, which IGLTA management apparently would prefer members did not know can actually be downloaded at no cost - as they seemingly would rather have IGLTA members pay $95 to IGLTA HQ to obtain a copy.
That is not a good look.
To close back on the bigger picture, the growing membership ennui with the IGLTA is perhaps best illustrated by the following remark - made just after Rick Hurlbut first raised his concerns about IGLTA's approach - by (now lapsed, former IGLTA member) Roy Heale on Facebook, about this whole sorry issue:
"The benefits of membership?".
Seems rather a fair question to be asked.
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