Major milestones for .travel registry
Tralliance Corporation, the .travel Registry, has appointed of
Ed Cespedes as Chief Executive Officer. Cespedes is a veteran of the online marketing industry and also serves as president of Tralliance Corporation`s parent company theglobe.com.
Ron Andruff, founder of the company, will continue in his role as president, leading the company`s global business development and external affairs initiatives.
The move comes six months after the official launch of the new Internet domain dedicated exclusively to the travel and tourism industry, and further positions the company to sharpen its focus on expanding the consumer benefits for the .travel Top Level Domain globally.
According to Cespedes, since the official launch of .travel in January of 2006, the company has achieved a number of critical milestones including:
- 140 travel trade associations, from 9 industry sectors and 73 countries, have joined The Travel Partnership Corporation, a Washington D.C. non-profit corporation formed to promote the .travel top-level domain.
- More than 30 travel trade associations are successfully providing authentication services (validating that a business applying for a .travel domain is a bona fide travel-related company with a legal claim to the .travel domain names they apply to register) and report that applicants have embraced the procedure.
- The Canadian Tourism Commission has established a new model for destination marketing by registering hundreds of .travel domain names for Canada`s provinces, cities, and other destinations, with the goal to have every Canadian destination registered with a .travel domain through the new canada.travel Internet portal.
- In the United States, the Department of Commerce worked with the .travel Registry in honor of National Tourism Week to challenge states, cities and tourism entities across America to protect their tourism assets by registering their .travel Internet domain names. Dialogue has been opened with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in anticipation of an outreach program to every chamber across the nation.
- The UNWTO continues to actively promote .travel and communicate to all 150 World Tourism Organization member nations. .travel has been presented at regional meetings from Mali (Africa) to Argentina, and most recently in Uruguay, where 30 Ministers from Latin American states were briefed.
- ASEANTA (the association of all travel agents, hotels, airlines and government NTO`s of Brunei, Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) is leading the way with www.aseanta.travel. At their 2007 Congress, they will utilize all .travel addresses for online communications and promote the domain to all attendees Singapore and Malaysia are already using their .travel addresses for their nation`s portals.
- The Indian Tourism Ministry is working with Tralliance to organize a tour of all of India`s 25 states to present and promote .travel to tourism officials in those regions in the last half of 2006.
- In concert with Tralliance, the EuroChambre, the association of all of Europe`s Chambers of Commerce, is developing an outreach plan to build awareness of the global migration of the industry to .travel, so that European Chambers, in turn, can bring this to the attention of their respective members.
- More than 150 tourism leaders attended the Middle East North Africa .travel Forum, hosted by the Egyptian Tourism Authority (egypt.travel) and regional industry leader, Emeco. The symposium served as a platform for discussion and strategic planning which will result in the development of a working plan to register place names throughout the Middle East and Africa.
Tralliance further reports that roughly 50 percent of .travel domain registrations to date are from North America and 50 percent from the rest of the world, reflecting the same pattern as the organic growth of the Internet over the last 10 years.
Cespedes adds,
In an online world dominated by search engine rankings, travel businesses cannot afford to sit on the sidelines and wait for their competitors to make a move before they register their own .travel domain names. The Internet community, and the way consumers search on the web, is about to undergo a paradigm shift, says Cespedes.
And when this fundamental change occurs, the playing field will be leveled.
Theodore Koumelis
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Thursday, July 27, 2006