So, dot-travel has revealed its plans for 2009 - raising consumer awareness and targeting large companies to migrate to the extension.
Tralliance, the company which administers the top-level domain is clearly trying to build up some enthusiasm for dot-travel
Last week the story of travel.answers sale for more than $3 million caused much scepticism from the online community.
Could it be that someone else is also trying to build up some momentum around the dot.travel top-level domain in advance of the auction of a number of dot-travel names by Domainfest next Thursday?
Interestingly, a quick check putting dot-travel at the end of large travel companies URLs - ie www.thomascook.travel - shows Thomas Cook, TUI and Ebookers all divert to their dot-com sites, so clearly none of them are promoting it.
I've never understood the reason for a .travel domain, I mean why would a .travel be any different than a .com or .co.uk
Slightly confused by this new strategy (or the previous one)
Get consumers to want to see .travel? That is going to be a major marketing campaign.
Get large companies to use .travel (by default) - problem is they have already invested significant sums in their existing URL.... so the change has to deliver ROI.
Serious chicken and egg going on here.
Somehow the consumer (or the business) needs to have additional value over a conventional domain in order to want to use it.
Examples
* Business - get $1000 in Google adsense advertising if you use .travel in your google advert
* Consumer - cashback (like Microsoft PPC)
Problem is I think it may be too late for .travel. Travel is too mature a sector so too few entrants?
I saw it launched a few years ago at World Travel Market. Then it was about directories etc.... I didn't buy the idea then.
Whatever momentum is created is going to come at marketing significant cost.
.travel A complete and utter load of hogwash... an excuse to just get owners of existing domains to shell out to buy another one to make sure they avoid cybersquatting.
I was at the launch too and thought at the time it was a total waste of time... nothing so far has changed my opinion
I think .travel shows the movement towards more keyword centric domain names.
In a world about showing up in Google, you better have a domain name that is specific.
Forget the corporate domains, just provide it at a small cost to every destination and be done with it. We don't need more confusion on-line, we need fewer domain squatters and more relevant content.
Over the past year we have been collating travel companies websites and I can honestly say that with over 15,000 websites under our belt we have seen very few .travel domains (69 if I have counted correctly) marketed as their main domain. I don't doubt that there are a number of travel companies that out of the 15,000+ have purchased a .travel domain (including us with http://www.travelbeen.travel) but this it would seem a pure brand protection move just like you would see with .net.
The one thing with .travel domain is that some travel companies are quite happy with their .co.uk or com.au as it becomes useful in denoting which country they are based. Additionally what would a global travel brand such as Expedia do with a .travel domain, which country version / market would it point to?
All in all I think that .travel have a huge task ahead of them, especially as there has been a decision last year by ICANN to relax the tld (top level domains) altogether so that you could end up with .anythingyouwanted - http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-4-26jun08-en.htm
Since when are TUI and Thomas Cook standards sustainability of the industry? When is it that they have been moving their business models beyond price, mass tourism and pure transactional webs. [ยท]Travel was born with the travel 2.0 concept and embracing the idea that content and conversations are most pertinent. If you belong to the travel industry and aim for meaning, 4 seconds ain't a lot of time to be credible and propose value, and surely not achievable today with the scarcity of valid names in the dot com arena. Issue is that the industry still struggles with things like SEM, SEO, domain strategy and post-click marketing - and these are the true barriers of adoption because business wise it makes sense to use .travel. Whole countries like Canada and New Zealand are today true beacons of integrated concepts applied to communication online - would you want to guess what their strategies guided them to use as domains?