Important Message About Potential Infringement of Global Business Travel Association/GBTA Marks

It has come to our attention that representatives from various scam marketing organizations have contacted our convention attendees and exhibitors offering “Attendee list of GBTA-2019 with their complete contact information including email and phone numbers” with the scam companies representing themselves as an approved vendor working on behalf of GBTA. No outside entity has been provided, or is authorized to sell any information related to our vendors, attendees, exhibitors, or other information.

As you know, GBTA is one of the leading business travel associations in the world and, as such, hosts our annual convention which attracts thousands of participants each year. This event, known as the GBTA Convention 2019, is our showcase of the business travel market’s latest products and services and an important source of cutting-edge information. GBTA owns various trademarks which represent our Association which are registered with the United States Patent & Trademark Office (“USPTO”). Be assured, we take this matter very seriously and, in our opinion, the activities of these scam marketing firms violate GBTA’s rights under the U.S. Trademark Statute, the Lanham Act, and, many state laws.

GBTA is pursuing all state and federal consumer protection laws to keep our participants, members and exhibitors safe from consumer fraud and telemarketing (and web) scams, available to ensure that rights in our Marks, and the privacy of our participants are protected.

If you would personally like to take action, you may report the spam addresses to two of the largest domain name hosting services: GoDaddy @ https://supportcenter.godaddy.com/abusereport or ENOM @ http://www.enom.com/help/abusepolicy.aspx.

If you receive any of these types of solicitations, please forward them to Heather Brown, hbrown@gbta.org, so we can respond appropriately and immediately.