LRA Worldwide Senior Consultant Jeff Gurtman Featured in “Travelzoo Unleashed” Video Series

HORSHAM, Pennsylvania; November 7, 2006 – Jeff Gurtman, a Senior Consultant in LRA Worldwide’s Quality Assurance and Mystery Shopping practice, is a featured contributor for the online video series “Travelzoo Unleashed.” In the first installment in the series, titled “Jeff Takes Manhattan,” Gurtman provides viewers with an irreverent look at some “off the beaten path” New York City attractions.

Created by Travelzoo, the Internet’s largest and most trusted publisher of travel deals, the video vignettes are designed to provide visitors with inspiration for a trip to the subject city, using a Travelzoo deal as a base of operations. For New York City, Gurtman used the Paramount Hotel in Times Square as his base, and revealed the charms of Chinatown, the Lower East Side and the Staten Island Ferry in his meanderings. The series will continue with visits to other cities, though none have been finalized at this time.

The “Travelzoo Unleashed” series is not Gurtman’s first foray into show business. He was one of the popular hosts of the Travel Channel’s Travel Spies, where he and his cohorts would visit various hospitality destinations undercover and rate the experience on a variety of factors. Gurtman served as the customer service guru. He was also a host for the mock makeover show, “Cube Fabulous,” which poked fun at the “makeover” genre by helping guests remake their office cubicles and attracted 4.5 million unique online viewers in the process.

“Jeff certainly does bring a bit of celebrity to LRA,” joked John Roberto LRA Senior Vice President and Managing Director of the firm’s Quality Assurance and Mystery Shopping practice. “More importantly, the creativity that Jeff displays in his media ventures translates into ‘outside the box’ thinking that benefits our clients every day.”

Gurtman, whose background and expertise is in customer service consulting for the hospitality industry, works on quality assurance programs for LRA Worldwide clients such as Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Churchill Downs Incorporated and Wyndham Worldwide. LRA offers Quality Assurance services either as a stand-alone offering or as an integrated part of an overall Customer Experience Management consulting project, where LRA might be facilitating several different activities simultaneously in order to help a client assess, design, implement and sustain their vision of the optimal customer experience. LRA customizes its QA programs to specific client needs, providing innovative quality assurance, brand compliance, site inspection, audit and mystery shopping programs globally for industry leaders in lodging, gaming, sports and travel.

About LRA Worldwide:
LRA Worldwide, Inc., is a leading consulting, organizational development and research company that specializes in Customer Experience Management (CEM). LRA helps companies and brands design and deliver the optimal customer experience across all key touch points using an integrated suite of services that measure and improve service quality, customer satisfaction, employee performance, loyalty, customer advocacy and profitability. LRA specializes in “operationalizing the brand” – turning brand promise and customer strategy into operational reality. LRA’s tactical CEM practice areas include Customer Experience Strategy Design, Standards Development & Content Management, Organizational Development & Training, Customer and Employee Research and Quality Assurance & Mystery Shopping; these are either deployed together in a strategic manner to continually monitor and improve the customer experience or deployed individually to address a specific client tactical need.

LRA’s clients include some of the world’s leading companies and brands in the hospitality industry and beyond, including Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Hard Rock, the PGA TOUR, Albertsons Supermarkets, the NBA and MGM MIRAGE. For more information, visit the company’s Web site at www.LRAworldwide.com.
# # #