Ask HN: Is the .travel TLD relevant?

4 points·dholowiski··4 comments

What are your thoughts - is the .travel TLD still relevant, does anybody recognize it, and if you're a travel company do you think you need to own one?

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I personally don't favor the industry TLDs except for .xxx (as it provides a convenient way to screen content for various audiences). I know that the foundation of DNS is industry-specific namespaces (.org .com .net .mil) but it doesn't seem relevant anymore.

It is going to be interesting to watch how the whole TLD "opening" is going to develop. So far the addition of new TLDs made more or less just the value of .coms stronger. Hard to predict how this is going to change when every ad on TV is going to have a different TLD.

I always try to think of it this way: How long would it take me to explain to someone 50+ how to get to my website? The problem with TLD's like *.travel, is everyone is used to the big 3, and you usually have to educate them that other ones exist.

This is totally on target. It's still hard to get users to stop typing in "www" before any web address you give them. Tell them to go to "my.site.com" and tons of users still type in "www.my.site.com" ... We will definitely have the same issues with more TLDs.

Read an article a while back for a proposal to allow any person / company to purchase an entire TLD for somewhere around $180K. This, and many of the other new TLDs, just seem like a huge money grab. Even the .xxx domain is being sold to non-adult companies in order for them to "protect" their name (so that you don't have mcdonalds.xxx or apple.xxx, etc.)

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