Domain launch puts money in charity's coffers
Tralliance made good on a promise with the first installment of its contributions to the British-based Just a Drop charity that strives to bring clean water to the underprivileged worldwide.
Tralliance pledged $1 per registered dot-travel domain name and handed over a check last week for the first $16,162 to Fiona Jeffery, chairman and founder of the charity.
Tralliance urges all registrants to match the gift with their own dollar per domain.
Andruff said there is a potential to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in the decades to come. -- N.G.
NEW YORK -- Its
official now: The travel industry has its own Internet domain name,
dot-travel, which officially launched here Jan. 29.
New York-based
Tralliance Corp., the registry charged with managing and developing
the new Internet domain, said that in the first 16 weeks of
operation, it had registered 16,162 dot-travel sites. The first 90
days were a trial period (required by the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers), which ended with the new year.
Ron Andruff,
Tralliance president, said the adoption rate, at about a thousand a
week, is a promising indicator for the future acceptance for a
domain that provides more structure in cyberspace for the travel
business than can be found in the dot-com world.
However, he added,
that was a start-up pace, and he does not expect the sign-on rate
to continue at that clip.
He said he could not
estimate what the numbers might be in a year or a few years, but he
was encouraged that the first 16,000-plus participants represent
all sectors of the travel business, a business he calls the worlds
largest industry in the world, and come from all parts of the
globe. As for the size of participants, he said, all major players
are in, and the smaller ones will come.
Domain names are sold
by registrars -- in effect, agents of the registry -- and prices
range from $95 to $280 for a name, Andruff said, adding that some
packages include creation of Web sites for customers.
He recounted reasons
he and dot-travel supporters believe the travel industry will
migrate to dot-travel.
According to Andruff,
the dot-travel domain can centralize the location of all entities
that consumers will need to find information and/or make bookings,
but with extra features: All domain holders must show their
legitimate travel connections and legal claim to any domain names
they choose before being assigned those names. Tralliance provides
this authentication service.
The effect, Andruff
said, will be to shut out those who buy domain names on speculation
and, in general, to eliminate clutter in this subset of the
Internet.
Later this year,
Tralliance also will roll out a dot-travel directory [at www.directory.travel], free for consumers and
initially in nine languages -- Arabic, English, French, German,
Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish. The
directory, in beta testing now, is designed to be a catalog of
products and services offered by dot-travel registrants.
Andruff said the
travel industry is leading the way in taking the Internet to the
next level with an orderly and unified effort that sorts out the
chaos of the dot-com box and creates a unique online identity for a
single industry.
Taking that to still
another level, the Canadian Tourism Commission said it will use www.Canada.travel to create an all-Canada portal meant
to encompass the entire Canada travel business and facilitate
searches by consumers or businesses. The portal will debut in the
second quarter.
Andruff said that, in
time, dot-travel will sound normal, as will other sponsored
domains, such as dot-finance and so forth.
To contact the
reporter who wrote this article, send e-mail to Nadine Godwin at [email protected].