FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

If you wish to end your membership, you need do that before October 1 of the preceding year. This is to avoid us making costs like printing a new brochure with your data in it, which we usually do in October.
Global Discovery can end your membership by notifying you so at any time. Your current membership will stay valid till the end of the membership period (a full calendar year) unless there are reasons to warrant earlier discontinuation. While we will give the member an explanation, we are not obliged to do so. Reasons for discontinuation could be: lack of service to customers, lack of communications, delayed payments or financial distress of the DMC, with a risk to its customers or direct competition with other members.

The Sunday before the WTM in London is our annual meeting. The program varies but involves subjects that should be interesting to most of you. All members are welcome and are expected to join, especially because it is a good time to get to know your colleagues and while we cannot guarantee you that participation will turn out well for you or how, it usually does as personal networking is the best way to create new opportunities and get new ideas and insights.

In 2017 we will open a tour database that is built in such a way that your tours can be published on any online platform if that platform facilitates a plug-in to publish data from this database to their platform in their look and feel. Members of our 12Go project will get their tours uploaded at no costs. Other members who want to join pay an entry fee of 250 euro and a yearly fee of 250 for the database to be maintained.

In 2014 we started our own web of B2C websites, all starting with ‘’want to go’’ or 12Go… This web of websites now covers 12 destinations but till date we have stopped marketing it as early conversion results were not up to par. We have a website for almost any destination. If you are interested, let us know.

Partner members get full access to our online B2B CRM in the second year of partner membership. The access is based on adding your own contacts to it and the ability to study and market contacts that others have put in. Other member levels get limited off line access in the form of a yearly spreadsheet.

All members need to work on getting their company, their tours and their supply chain as sustainable as possible. We expect all existing members to acquire a form of certification or partnership in Sustainable Tourism by the end of 2018. New members need to start the process of certification within the second year of membership. We prefer Travelife as a Sustainable Tourism certification, but other ones are acceptable, if approved by our Sustainable Tourism Officer Graham Read. Graham is very experienced and can help you with the implementation of the Travelife system, which not only helps you with Sustainable Tourism but in fact helps you to upgrade the level of your company organization.

We are happy to help you with questions that you may have and these communications are included in the membership, based on fair use policy. Our team is small and has limited capacity. If a request from your side involves considerable work, we will charge you on an hourly basis for the requested service. For instance: we can give you an example of a currency agreement with a tour operator for free, but if you want us to counsel you and help you adjust that agreement to your situation, we count the time used.

Membership is annually and the invoice for the full year is payable up front before 31 January. The reason is that our largest costs are travel fairs and these quite often need to be paid months ahead. If you want to join during a year, we will agree on a fee payable till the end of the calendar year, based on what activities are still happening in those months and if we can insert you on time in a new brochure etc. For details of the cost per membership, please click here.
Additional costs will be charged per the service provided. In the case that we mediate actively to get you an account or a booking with a tour operator that is not working with you yet, we charge 2{cade3cd6ea44c9e099402f61e95e983e8f83ab951f3ff944c0038bbba399d24f} commission on your sales up to a maximum of 50.000 euro turn over, so maximum commission of 1.000 euro. This commission is used to actively pursue and visit potential B2B customers. An invoice will be drawn up every six months, based on booked and paid sales.
Our Spanish representative works on an open ended 5{cade3cd6ea44c9e099402f61e95e983e8f83ab951f3ff944c0038bbba399d24f} commission basis on turn over for accounts and bookings he acquires for you. An invoice will be drawn up every six months based on booked and paid sales.

To avoid confusion we consider the following destination eligible for a Micro level membership;
Afghanistan*, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola*, Antigua and Barbuda, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Brunei, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo – Democratic Republic, Congo – Republic*, Cook Islands, Côte d’Ivoire – Ivory Coast, North Korea*, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Egypt*, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Fiji, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Iraq, Jordan*, Kiribati, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malawi, Mali, Marshall Islands, Mauritania, Micronesia, Mozambique, Nauru, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan*, Palau, Palestine, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Somaliland, South Sudan, Sudan, Surinam, Swaziland, Syria*, Tajikistan, East Timor, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia*, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Ukraine, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela*, Yemen*, Zambia, Zimbabwe*
Countries with a * have a temporarily diminished tourism potential due current political circumstances.

• As mentioned above we have four different types of membership. It is possible to move up to partner level coming from one of the other three. When this results in conflict with destination exclusivity (being a partner level privilege) will result in cancellation of the membership of any remaining Micro, Specialist or Entry level membership after consultation.
• Entry membership is only valid for one year. After the first year the choice has to be made to become a Partner level member of stop the membership.
• A Partner level member can claim more destinations as ‘exclusive’ linked to their company provide they have their own operational office in this destination (no third party local partner). The maximum of destination that can be claimed by one company is four. Adding an additional destination costs € 500,- annually.

The key to our strength is cooperation and sharing information, while behaving like part of a team. We expect you to appoint a person in your team who can liaise between your company staff and our team fast and fully. When you become a member, you need to submit a full list of your current customers in return for access to the customer details of other members.
We expect from our members that they view opportunities for other members as this will have a mutually beneficial effect. We expect our members to behave in such a way that they do not contravene the interests of other members. Direct competition breaks the basic strength of our network.
We expect our members to provide high quality services and smooth, proper communication to their customers based on the principles of sustainable tourism: leave nothing but your footprint, take nothing but your memories, support the local economy, treat people well, including the people that work for you and your suppliers, care for nature, in short: the ‘’People, Planet, Profit’’ principle.
We share in our common database the details of our B2B customers and this is highly confidential, so you need to protect those data and work with them in accordance with the guidelines given with the database.

Our small team is very active promoting the network through travel fairs, newsletters and data-sharing. We also publish your data in a brochure and on a website. A list of activities can be found on the membership pages of www.globaldiscovery.com We also provide support with a variety of services, from marketing and web services to advise regarding reservation systems, (re)organization and profitability and help with mergers and take-overs.

Simply because the value of your membership will be fully realized each year you are a member. Success stories include business partnerships created, significant bottom line savings from member only discounts, media coverage worth thousands of dollars and access to consumers, agents and partners.

Global Discovery is a network of inbound agents of DMCs with the goal to improve business, refer customers, network, exchange knowledge on IT solutions and other aspects of the business and extend the reach of sustainable tourism for the benefit of our destinations and our members.