Consumer awareness and getting large businesses on board are the priorities for top-level domain dot-travel this year. Chief executive Ed Cespedes of Tralliance, which administers the TLD, said the company is devising ways to further its reach without investing millions. “Any new top level domain costs $250m to make the consumer aware and although more…
Dot-travel administrator outlines 2009 strategy
Consumer awareness and getting large businesses on board are the priorities for top-level domain dot-travel this year.
Chief executive Ed Cespedes of Tralliance, which administers the TLD, said the company is devising ways to further its reach without investing millions.
“Any new top level domain costs $250m to make the consumer aware and although more and more people have heard of it, we’re not there yet and it’s a big task.”
Cespedes added that while dot-travel is seeing uptake amongst new businesses because of the crowded dot-com space, the domain has yet to see a large brand move over.
Dot-travel is hoping awareness will build through the existing destinations such as Egypt using it as well as using some of the social media sites to promote it.
“We have built a presence on myspace, facebook and youtube and we have to be very creative but we’re going where the people are.”
Cespedes added that the dot-travel case had been proven in 2008 with destinations such as Poland and Cancun adopting the extension as well as high rankings in the search engines for companies using dot-travel.
Next Thursday, a string of dot.travel domains are to be auctioned by Domainfest Global including City.travel, Europe.travel, Fly.travel, TripPlanner.travel and HotDeals.travel.
Cespedes said: “If it goes well it will bring some celebrity to the domain. We have also signed up Moniker as a registrar and they have about a million visitors a week.”
