Tralliance
president/CEO
Ron Andruff
Tired of trying to keep
straight which websites end in .com, .org or .gov? Well,
say hello to .travel, whose aim actually is to help sort out the
clutter surrounding the search for information. This new domain was
created to help web surfers zero in on travel sites that have met
certain exacting criteria, to help distinguish them from “junk”
sites.
“Every entity that wants a .travel
website has to go through authentication,” explains Ron Andruff,
president and CEO of Tralliance, the entity that is managing the
.travel domain. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Buenos Aires, Boise or
Bangkok, everybody goes through this process. This way we can make
sure only travel and tourism entities have a .travel
identification.”
According to Andruff, specialized
top-level domains like .travel are the future of the web. “Internet
1.0 was a place where if somebody landed on your site, you hoped
you might sell them something,” he says. “Internet 2.0 is about
being specific about what you do.”
Travelers can click into www.search.travel to
conduct a search among .travel websites. Right now, the directory
isn’t robust enough to produce uniformly reliable results, but that
is changing quickly. Says Andruff, “Every day, more registrations
are coming through. We’re closing in on 21,000 domain names
registered and sold. The sooner we embrace it and engage it, the
sooner it will be useful for all of us. Five years from now, people
will say, if you don’t have a .travel domain name, you won’t be a
verified part of the industry.”
For more information, visit www.travel.travel.