Already in 2005 initial contracts were signed and agreed upon between Tralliance and ICANN (Internet Corporation for assigned names and numbers) which resulted in Tralliance being eligible to operate the .travel top level domain for travel industry related businesses. While over 3 years have passed since the initial contracts were signed, we are now wondering where .travel stands today.

This article functions as an introduction and update to the .travel top level domain and what impact it can have on travel and hospitality and internet in general.
.travel provides travel and tourism businesses the opportunity to register their name in the internet travel segment, stating you are affiliated with travel by using a specific .travel extension for your website. Unlike other top level domains such as .com, .org, and .net, .travel is only available for those business and organizations that are active in the travel industry.

Therefore, to ensure the websites are operated by legitimate travel organizations, all .travel domains will have to go through an eligibility review process in order to get approved for using such an extension. Not being travel related (according to the evaluation process) and thus not eligible to use the extension, it should be impossible to gain a .travel domain.

With having .travel domain names available exclusively for the travel industry, .travel was supposed to be the top level domain which should by now have been widely accepted in the industry and common for customers to recognize.

After three years about 250.000 .travel websites are now registered, opposed to .com websites which account for close to 80 million registrations (of which is guessed 20 percent belong to travel and tourism). For an industry as large as the online travel and hospitality industry, we would have expected more .travel domains to have been registered. This might have something to do with the price of $99.00, which is rather expensive for a top level domain, whereas you can have a .com domain for little over $10.00 per year nowadays. Especially for smaller companies the added value of a .travel domain is not yet showing as .travel is not yet having the authority among consumers which was originally hoped for. Also, we suspect that of the 250.000 .travel names registered most of them are registered from a point of ‘protecting’ a brand name or companies having their hopes up for the top level domain to become popular.

Apart from the rather low amount of registrations, the .travel domain did not achieved in its purpose of specifically stating a company is affiliated with travel and tourism. From a consumer point of view, there is little to none awareness that .travel actually exists and is limited to companies affiliated with travel and tourism. However, Tralliance is stating that the demand for .travel domains is increasing, as the relevance of the top level domain within search engines is growing and consumer awareness is also increasing. This might also have to due with the fact that at the beginning of 2008 Tralliance decided to lower the requirements for companies applying for a .travel domain.

ICANN has announced that it has plans to open more top level domains, enabling brands and organizations to claim their own top level domain. This announcement has fired up the discussion of using subject specific extensions, such as the .travel domain. With the overload of information on the internet, subject specific top level domains could be solving an problem which is becoming bigger and bigger, for both consumers and search engines. Both will be able to determine the relevance of a website by examining the extension and filtering out the irrelevant websites, while only relevant companies are allowed to use the top level domain. For this purpose, Tralliance has already launched search engine search.travel, which is only searching for relevant travel and tourism websites using the extension.

We expect the .travel (same for other top level domains such as .mobi and to a lesser extend for .aero) will play its part in the future of the internet. For now however, the urge of having such top level domains is not yet present, neither for consumers or companies. As long as consumers are finding .com and .net more relevant, we suggest companies to stick to their .com websites. Like most major companies do, having a .travel redirecting to your website, should be an option for those who can afford, otherwise don’t bother for now.

Visit travel.travel for more information on top level domain .travel.

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