I took the time to read the first five links which this person representing 'passport premiere' has posted,
Everything about them stinks to high heaven of
astroturfing. For those not aware of the term, astroturfing is defined as:
A form of advocacy in support of a political, organisational, or corporate agenda, designed to give the appearance of a "grassroots" movement. The goal of such campaigns is to disguise the efforts of a political or commercial entity as an independent public reaction to another political entity—a politician, political group, product, service or event. The term is a derivation of AstroTurf, a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to look like natural grass.
Some of the clues that giveaway these are astroturfing messages:
- Posted by users who only have a single review to their name on a site, and it's in relation to a single company.
- Reference to the companies name in the exact same way, right down to capitalisation, in a way that would be consistent with corporate style.
- Deliberate use of the companies URL in the text body, usually in the first line (deliberate attempt to improve SEO for the company).
- Unnatural messages - don't read as written by a normal human: Seems like marketing speak as in too close to a companies positioning points, excess use of sentences and capitalisation of words.
- Doesn't pass the sniff test (if it looks too good to be true...)
- None of the forum messages confirm any of the results or statements - they're just someone suggesting to use them. Nothing has come back to prove the claims of the service.
- Any official mouthpiece never highlights bad information about them. Exhibit A: Anyone used 1st-air.com? - FlyerTalk Forums
Their site
And not withstanding, their website design and code is circa early 2000. They obviously can't be that good or profitable at what they do, as they can't afford real people to maintain their site and content (a lot it has been edited in MS Word); and continue to run the site in the Cold Fusion programming language (a dead language that should have been buried years ago).
And their press releases - egads. If the person who authored those claims to be a professional they must be high. Those are some of the most god awful press releases I've ever seen. No wonder they didn't get published independently by a 3rd party and they had to pay for them to be released on wire services (hence why there are Yahoo links, so those can automatically be discounted as having no authority as they are just wire service press releases).
And who are the people behind the company?
I'm going to go out on a limb, and say that the person behind the Passport Premiere account is either Mark Wahlen (my 1st guess based on the poor quality of the language and the close match to the press releases), or the mysterious Rafael Resendiz. Of course there's no information on their website exactly confirming whom their executives offices or company staff are - getting those two names took a little work. (Correction:
since found it, but it raises other questions).
The only references online for Mark Wahlen all come from paid press release wire services. He has no profile on any professional networks or sites, nor does he seem to be a member of any credible PR body. There's nothing about who he is to show what he's about and his background.
Digging into Rafael Resendiz, just brings up even more question marks. Again, nary a mention in any credible sources of record, and again no profile in any social network. References for him to 1st Air turn up a lot of mentions on paid-for newswire services, a truckload of spammy blog sites (used for Black Hat SEO techniques - see dictionary under bad and evil) and comments offering nothing of value at all, and spammy sites where you can pay (or occasionally free) to list details of your company that no credible entity would touch with a 200ft bargepole draped in a hazmat suit with its own oxygen supply.
And let's dig deeper shall we
Looking into their domain registration, we can use that to find more information about this company.
2007 Canadian lawsuit for not paying their credit card company back for chargebacks
I bet 1st Air don't want you knowing about the
2007 Canadian lawsuit brought against them and related company MAR-RAY Associates, Inc. and their Canadian entity Livingston Travel, by
Ticketmaster Canada, who sued 1st Air for nearly USD 100,000 in damages for
failing to pay monies owed due to credit card chargebacks.
And the outcome, default judgement for Ticketmaster Canada as the companies and individuals Robert Laney and Jacqueline DiBella who were also later added to the docket as respondents in the case failed to show or enter any defence.
Sadly my search-fu in getting details of the BC Supreme Court docket in this case was a little poor, but I'll speak to some friends in those circles in North America to see if they can find the case and citation on LexisNexis or similar databases to confirm it.
Livingston travel yields more information
And looking at Livingston Travel - well what do you know, information on their shady past continues to turn up,
a-la this FlyerTalk thread from 2003. You can read it yourself, but it backs up why the 2007 case was brought by Ticketmaster Canada - that's for sure. It also backs up some previous claims about dubious booking practices relating to their ticketing methods.
2001 shows up even more dodgy booking practices, with this Flyertalk thread covering
hidden cities and illegal fares booked by the company.
And no suprise, there was even an anti-1st air site running at one stage -
http://www.1stair-not.com/. Sadly it wasn't popular enough to be stored by the Internet Archive's Wayback Engine.
Robert Laney has a dubious past too
Looking into Robert, we turn up another court docket:
Incentive Connection Travel, Inc. v. 1st-Air.Net Inc. (D. Ariz. Dec. 27, 2006).
I'll let NV Flyer take up the story on this one:
According to ICT, 1st-Air.Net “engaged in the use of ‘hidden cities’ and ‘throw away’ segments, and other prohibited ticketing practices,” thereby violating the contract between them. ICT terminated the contract, which contained an arbitration provision. 1st-Air.Net filed a demand for arbitration; ICT filed a counterclaim, as well as a third party claim against 1st-Air.Net’s principals, Jackie DiBella and Robert Laney.
But the most interesting tidbit of that report is a paragraph above that:
According to ICT, 1st.Air-Net “is required to use host agencies because, among other reasons, United Airlines terminated its Sales Agreement . . . and the Airline [sic] Reporting Corporation terminated the ability of First Air . . . to purchase tickets.”
I wonder why UA would have terminated the agreement of 1st Air - would have had to be both serious and a really good reason for it.
And Jacqueline DiBella
Well, she's the only one I can actually find credible information for. According to her LinkedIn profile, she stopped being an EVP of 1st Air in June 2006 - but they still list her as on the board of directors.
She seems to be the only person out there for whom decent information is available on, including the fact she likes to vote Democrat and contribues to their campaigns frequently.
Having said that, she also for a time seemed to either be running or be directly involved in another low-rent virtual agency called Hi-Qual Travel run out of NY.
So in summary
Everything about this company, the people involved with it, their reputation, and how they do things stinks to high heaven.
And worse, because 1st Air continues to troll the internet, they have just brought upon themselves the proverbial Streissand Effect. I can guarantee that any searches for 1st Air by weeks end will have this post and the thead as a whole appearing as #1 on related searches for the company names, officers name, and related parties. They won't be able to escape from any of their past, current and future misdeeds again.
So well done Mark and/or Rafael. Your inability to keep your mouth closed has given this ol' school nerd and researched a good enough reason to dig around in your publically known and publically available pasts and find out all the things and link to them that you don't want prospective customers knowing. <sound of a golf clap>
