Online Revealed Calgary 2008

BLOGOLOGUE Dot Travel The rise and fall of a brilliant concept An Excerpt from the Blog “TourismInternetMarketing.com” by Jens Thraenhart I wrote about “dot travel” on my blog in the past, and just for the record, personally I still believe in the original dot travel concept, as well as the purity of the dot travel domain extension for travel and tourism related web addresses. However, I was saddened when I read the press release below and I realized that the dot travel concept may have been killed by greed and short-term vision. travel to release nearly 300,000 destination names. .travel domain registrar, EnCirca issued a .travel advisory regarding the release of nearly 300,000 reserved destination names. Effective with the new relaxed eligibility policy, the .travel registry is planning to release thousands of reserved place names, such as cities, iconic cultural sites and world heritage landmarks. These .travel domain names are ideal for search engine marketing since keywords in domain names are given extra weight in search engine rankings. Destination management organizations and tourism boards had until December 21, 2007 to secure their destination names from EnCirca before they are released for public registration. (For Immediate Release - Travel News Distribution, December 2007) To track back, in January of 2006, Ron Andruff and his business partner Cherian Mathei launched dot travel officially to the global travel and tourism industry in New York, after many years of collaborating with industry leaders and ICANN. The concept was a brilliant one, which had the potential to open up tourism for smaller destinations and small medium enterprises, even in areas of the world that do not have the big advertising budgets or brand awareness. It also had the great potential to bring a bit of order into the mess of finding travel-related information on the Internet (now the biggest category on the Web). Furthermore, by making online travel more consumer friendly and reducing browsers’ frustration, this initiative would have helped grow a stronger tourism industry world-wide. Every great concept makes or breaks with the execution. I believed in the founding team as Ron focused his efforts in building relationships with the industry to embrace this new domain name and tried to make travel and tourism > 8 | ONLINE REVEALED CANADA 2008 | onlinerevealed.com http://www.TourismInternetMarketing.com http://www.ibsplc.com http://www.ibsplc.com http://www.onlinerevealed.com

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