.TRAVEL DOMAINS - Pro's and Con's

On the surface, .travel domains can appear too long, unwieldy and potentially unnessesary. Maybe for travel companies such as “Thomas Cook”, a .travel domain will actually look good and achieve its purpose (thomascook.travel). Not only does it inform the customer that this is a bona fide travel company, but it also doesn’t seem too awkward as a long domain name. However there are a lot of company names such as “Dash” (dash.travel), which can it look less like a domain and more like a funky name (DashDot Travel).

We have been brought up on the internet to trust and aspire towards short domains such as .com. Although 60% of people couldn’t tell you what com stands for (commercial), the likelihood is that they will hold a .com site in more esteem than any other. Long domains such as .travel almost seem to be in conflict with our deep-rooted preferences. This, coupled with the badly managed release of .travel domains has lead to a situation where 12 years after their release, there are still millions of .travel domains yet to be registered.

Why use a .travel domain when a .com is more than adequate?

Due to its popularity, .com has almost become completely saturated with domain names. There are only so many combinations of letters and numbers that we can viably use to brand our products and services. This is one of the reasons for the creation of new generic Top-Level Domains.

.com domains can also be rather vague as to the site’s purpose or industry. Nowadays, domains such as .xxx, .jobs, .biz, .pro, and .info are successfully integrated into our internet experience to automatically enable us to identify and zero-in on our intended browsing goals. .travel is merely the next logical step in the evolution of the online travel industry.

In essence it comes down to personal or professional preference. If you don’t need to advertise that you are part of the travel industry, then maybe completely adopting the domain is not for you. Many large travel companies have bought up theircompanyname.travel as a means of driving traffic towards their site. 

Does a .travel domain enable you to rank higher in Google, or any other search engine for that matter?

No. As far as anyone has been able to discern, the use of a .travel domain or any other domain (including .com) does not affect the ranking of your website in any of the popular search engines. 

How can a .travel domain be used to drive more traffic to your website then?

Customer Experience (CX)is the goal of all online entities. Search engines want to provide the most accurate answer to their users’ queries, informational sites want to provide the most widely referenced and easily accessible information, internet companies want the customer to choose their website from the search results, spend time on their pages and find their checkout system so easy, that they buy the product or service without any hassle. In essence, if the customer is happy with your site, the search engines will send then to you, if the search engines like you, other websites will want to link with you. This all means that if the customer likes your site and TRUSTS it, you will be a successful online business.

Trust is key to driving more traffic to your site. When people link to Frank Domains or if we pop up in search results, our potential customers have 3 bits of immediate information with which to decide whether we are trustworthy: Our name, the context surrounding the link (meta data/content) or our web address (www.frankdomains.com). Our name is undoubtedly enough to illuminate customers to our purpose and practice, but they can also come to the same conclusion via our website address. If however we happened to be a travel company, this information would be completely misleading. In this case, www.frankdomains.travel would offer a better idea as to what we do. Doing so would not only enable potential customers to identify us as a travel company, but it would also ensure them that due to the regulations surrounding the registration of the domain, we are a ‘true blue’ travel company. Effectively driving more traffic to our site…Unfortunately, as things stand, we are not eligible to apply for and register our own .travel site, understandibly. 

How can a .travel domain be used to steal traffic from your website? 

Here’s the catch! Unlike the .jobs domains, where the domain name has to be an exact match with the company name (Frank Domains – www.frankdomains.jobs), .travel domains can be owned by absolutely any travel-authenticated company. This means that “Dot to Dot Travel” can steal traffic from “Overland Travel Operator” by applying for .travel certification, after which they register both dot-to-.travel (their own) as well as overland.travel , overland-operators.travel and any number of derivations that they can come up with. 

The upshot of these tactics is that when a potential customer comes to search for Overland Travel Operators there is a 50/50 chance that they will end up with Dot to Dot travel. Dependant upon how competitive the two companies are, these tactics could mean that 50% of all queries for your own company name could result in revenue for you competitor.

In sum .travel is very useful, but due to its nature it can be very dangerous if you don't register and protect your company name.