Meet Internet Entrepreneur and Travel Show Host: Matt Griffith

How an island in North Carolina, USA, kick-started Matt’s career in the online travel industry, and started a three-season travel show.

In this member interview, we talk with Matt Griffith – the CEO of World Tourism and producer and host of the Amazon Prime TV travel show Places to Go.

Read the story of Matt Griffith and why he created the World Tourism network.

How did you start out in the travel industry?

Topsail Island is a 26-mile long island on North Carolina’s coast.

I registered both Topsail.com and TopsailIsland.com in 1997 (23 years ago) and started hosting single info pages on the different businesses on the island.

The website started as an online business directory, later evolving to be a vacation home booking site for the island — it instantly became the most popular website for Topsail Island.

Why did you buy over 700 travel domain names?

My first travel website, Topsail.com covered a small island with around 1500 vacation rentals, and I wanted to build a larger travel business to generate more revenue.

I began looking for new travel domain names — but as expected, all the domains were already registered. I then spent the next few years acquiring names at auction as they expired and yes, some went for very high prices.

In just a little more than 3 years, we acquired over 700 domain names for destinations around the world including countries, states, cities, and regions.

We now own names like USTourism.com, FranceTourism.com, UKTourism.com, DCTourism.com, VegasTourism.com, and many more.

Tell us about your network called World Tourism

We began working on software to power our 700+ domains in a unified manner, called WorldTourism.com — we’ve spent nearly a million dollars on domains and development to build what was destined to be the largest tourism network in the world.

Our plan is to provide great destination marketing content on all of our websites allowing guest bloggers, offering websites, mobile apps, POS systems, mesh Wi-Fi networks, cloud PBX systems and a wide range of products and services to industry businesses.

How did you create an Amazon Prime TV show?

The idea for a travel TV show was brought up at our company board meeting. We decided to call the TV show “Places To Go”. Everybody liked the idea — even me until I realized that everyone wanted ME to be the host!

I (reluctantly) agreed and we did a test filming. A long-time TV and film industry agent watched the test shoot and declared I needed training.

I traveled to London and studied at Pinewood Studios in London for host training, also known as “presenter training” in the UK.

The first season of Places To Go had 9 episodes and received good ratings, and season two called for 20 episodes and became even more popular.

Watch the Season 2 Trailer of ‘Places To Go’:

We were preparing to start filming for season three when COVID-19 hit and halted everything.

How has COVID-19 and the pandemic affected your business?

The pandemic postponed season three of our Places to Go travel show. Our World Tourism travel network was set to launch in March 2020, and we halted that because of the virus.

Like practically every other travel and tourism industry business, it has decimated our financial outlook.

If you had asked me a year ago if there was anything that could kill tourism, I would have said it’s unstoppable. Now, we’re trying to wait this out just like every other business.

Fortunately for us, we have such a large portfolio of domain names that we have decided to sell off 10-15% of them to buy us that extra time that we need.

When will travel rebound?

I believe travel will open up sometime between next (northern hemisphere) spring and summer. We will start seeing normalcy although it may be a “new normal”.

Our goal was to build World Tourism and World Corporation to a $100 million company within 5 years of launch. It might be a quarter to half that in 5 years because of COVID-19. But travel will be back and we’ll be there with it!

— Thanks Matt for sharing your story with us!

Follow Matt Griffith on Travel Massive to connect with him and learn more about his projects – World Tourism and Places To Go.