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Dear Fellow Traveler,

I often talk to people about my world travels and how travel changed my life. Having been born in beautiful Santorini, Greece, and enlightened in the culturally diverse wonderland of San Francisco, I sometimes feel like the luckiest guy in the world. But it was my travels beyond these places that inspired me to create TicketPlanet.com.

In 1979, at 19 years of age, I set off from Greece on a big Europe "stomp". Traveling by car, train, and bus - - by any cheap way imaginable - - I backpacked my way around the continent. I slept on army bases in Germany. I ran with the bulls in Spain and I came through major car accident in France unscathed. These and other adventures of that Euro-trip left me with a wanderlust that hasn't faded, and probably never will.

In 1984, I embarked upon the journey that forever changed my life. While on the Greek Island of Ios, I met Swen and Maria from Sweden. They told me of these marvelous tickets they bought in Athens, flying on an airline that I had never heard of called Biman, Bangladesh. They had paid $280.00 US for a multi-stopover ticket from Athens to Bombay to Dhaka, and then from Kathmandu to Rangoon to Bangkok. After two weeks with my new Swedish friends (and many of rounds of Ouzo), I decided to forfeit my return ticket to San Francisco and join them on their journey.

It was on a beach in southern India that I found my calling. I decided that my mission in life would be to make around-the-world travel affordable for Americans. I would do what no American travel agency had done to that point by bridging together a group of airline tickets to create amazingly cheap multi-stop itineraries.

Since creating the affordable multi stop model, I have also focused on a business and first class model that saves people who in business and first class savings up to 60 percent off of the airlines published fares.

The rest is history. I have been able to visit sixty-six countries in my travels. I consider myself very fortunate to have seen so much of the world. With this passion for travel at the forefront of my existence, it's a true please to assist as many people as I can to experience the world as I have.

Nicholas C. Kontis

Ceo