If you live in dot-com land, do you want to move to dot-travel
where consumers will recognize you as a travel provider? Or do you
want to stay comfortably nested in dot-com land and let the words
before the dot-com speak for themselves?
And if dot-travel becomes one of the new usages in the Internet
lexicon, do you want the International Air Transport Association
(IATA), consisting of the world's airlines, to be the arbiter of
who gets which dot-travel name? Under a plan submitted by IATA to
the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, (ICANN), that
could happen.
Travel agency representatives already have indicated that they
wouldn't be overjoyed at the notion of any more supervision by the
airline community. Richard Copland, the new ASTA president,
questioned whether IATA should be allowed play the role of Internet
name dispenser. Before IATA's plan goes any further, Copland says,
agents should join the discussion.
Hotel industry spokesman Bill Fisher of the American Hotel &
Motel Association (AH&MA) isn't as worried about it as long as
the plan "doesn't intrude on hotels," and Robert Sharak of the
Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) notes that
associations don't usually ask each other for permission to take
initiatives of this kind.
The idea of a dot-travel may never see the light of day because
ICANN is going to have many more new so-called "top-level domain"
names suggested than will be accepted.
The reason for the move toward new names is that the English
language has been exhausted in the rush to append words to dot-com,
and the public supposedly is hopelessly confused in trying to sort
which dot-com does what.
I don't have a clue if dot-travel will become reality but it
doesn't sound like a great idea to me for IATA to be the gatekeeper
for the spectrum of travel industry companies.
An umbrella organization encompassing the range of industry
sectors or an even-handed third party would make more sense.
And dot's dot.