CircleID

All three sTLDs still have potential, but mostly demonstrate the effects of ICANN application/beauty-contest over-enthusiasm meeting the reality of who domain buyers really are.  Let's face it, there is so little volume and so many extra hoops to jump through that it's no surprise the registries are unhappy with registrars - many registrars can't be bothered with hand-holding sTLD registrants.

sTLDs in the new round (.travel, .jobs) seem to have already powered ahead of the first three in terms of number of domains sold (numbers are not public yet, but .travel publicly announced "tens of thousands" and .jobs seems to be under 10K so far). Of course, .pro has become a bit of an embarrassment considering the Mack-truck loophole created by Encirca that is still wide open.

Each of these (coop, aero, museum) have credible and well funded "real-life" entities who are potential customers.  In some ways, the amount of education to get an entity to register a .museum instead of a .org, or an .aero instead of a .com is high; combine that with the fact that many Internet users still expect ".com" or the country code equivalent to be the default domain name, the challenges for small sponsored TLDs are quite high.

Since you can't buy a .travel domain until tomorrow, doesn't it seem a little bit premature to claim "tens of thousands" sold?  There are definitely tens of thousands of geographic place names reserved, but that's meaningless, since there's no reason to believe that anyone connected with those place names knows or cares about it.  (The only person who could have asked to have trumansburg.travel reserved is me, and I didn't.) There are about 20,000 reserved airport and airline names in .aero, after all.

Trailliance does have a spiffy little directory at http://www.nic.travel/directory.htm which appears to be open to anyone who's applied to preregister.  Poke around in all the categories and you'll find, oh, two or three dozen registrants, many with ten variant names.  Either the vast majority of .travel registrants don't want anyone to know about them, or there aren't very many of them. You decide which is more likely.

I assume that the .travel zone file will be available under the same terms as all the other GTLDs, so it should be easy enough to get it, strip out the reserved ones, and see what the reality is.  In the meantime, tens of registrants? Sure. Tens of thousands? In your dreams.

Here are some additional information and corrections regarding .travel.  The registry actually has a very well-planned and deliberate start-up period for the domain.

- Today's .travel milestone refers to the elimination of a wait period for newly authenticated registrants.  .travel actually went live on October 3 and well over 10K names have been registered. 

- Governments and tourism boards are well aware of their ability to claim the reserved place names via the UN's World Tourism Organization
(http://www.world-tourism.org/newsroom/Releases/2005/july/travel.htm)
as well as various Convention Bureau organzations such as the Destination Marketing Association International (http://www.iacvb.org).  I would expect the top 100-200 leading tourism destinations will be claimed and registered (they have until March 31, 2006 to do so)

- Those place names not claimed by tourism boards will be snapped up by tour operators and other travel intermediaries.  This will occur later this month and then again in April.

- The travel directory at directory.travel has not been populated yet.  This occurs later in 2006.

Regards,

Tom Barrett
EnCirca, Inc
http://www.encirca.com

If you say there are 10K registrations, I believe you since you presumably registered most of them.

So I pointed my browser at www.expedia.travel, and I got an Encirca page, not Expedia. I tried www.orbitz.travel and got the same Encirca page, not Orbitz. I tried www.marriott.travel and got the Encirca page again, not Marriott.  How about www.bestwestern.travel? Encirca. www.budget.travel? Encirca. www.econolodge.travel? Encirca. Then I tried www.qantas.travel and got redirected to Qantas' home page, so it's not just a broken zone file.

The WHOIS info for all those domains looks OK, but I am having trouble figuring out how all those companies would go to the trouble to get a .travel domain and then not spend the five minutes needed to point it at their existing web sites.

The WHOIS info for all those domains looks OK, but I am having trouble figuring out how all those companies would go to the trouble to get a .travel domain and then not spend the five minutes needed to point it at their existing web sites.

John, your analysis assumes that these companies registered these names for use, rather than for intellectual property protection, which is the primary target audience in the early days of any registry.  It's normal that most of these registrations not get redirected, since these registrations often get made by attorneys rather than technologists who can update the NS records.

I can assure you that these companies have not stopped at just protecting their trademarks.

In the coming months, you will see well known destinations start to migrate to .travel domains.  I know of several that have already made the commitment.  This type of change requires a different strategy than just redirecting the domains. 

If these names were registered merely for defensive reasons, then the logical next step would be to redirect them to existing websites.

But we believe that simple redirection is the wrong step to take to start building equity in the new .travel names.

Tom Barrett
EnCirca, Inc
http://www.encirca.biz/