Travel Domains May Spike on AA Flight from Expedia

American Airlines may fly the friendly skies, but their e-commerce department is throwing the strangest PR campaign ever known to man. Evidently the ongoing feud between American Airline, a premier carrier of international routes that dominates many region of domestic travel within the United States, and Expedia, the flashy Internet era travel website,  have gone to war. Furthermore, Expedia rival travel website Orbitz also got the boot from American Airlines two weeks ago. Both splits involved contract negotiation failure for timely re-ups.

Where does that place club and bonus members with loyalty participation expectations? Consumers may get caught in the crossfire. In an era when airline representatives refer phone call-in traffic to the website to make programmed flight changes or purchases, consumers need access to usable online airline portals. The good news for domainers is that newbie travel or airfare domains might get a spike of search engine traffic from frustrated consumers looking for that American Airlines fare and schedule data.

Domain webmasters and programmers who can utilize host data from American and dispense their schedules and fares could enjoy a dramatic pike as consumers flail wildly online using Google and other search engines t mine flight information.  Travel pricing is also a main online search factor for travel departments and travel bureaus. Orbitz and Expedia losing this search traffic mean that its anybody’s to grab in the online travel site domain market.

What is “dental” to do with “.travel”?

I saw the domain sale of Dental.Travel for over $2,000 ( $2,295 ) and it was a bit surprising to see the .travel domain sale as “dental” keyword was not related to “travel” industry.

I thought about registering some .travel domains but there were a bit of strict criteria and EnCirca website mentioned on their .travel domain webpage as follows.

“Improved branding and connection with the travel and tourism industry” and “Authentication by independent third party lowers cyber-squatting and domain name speculators.”

I wonder how someone could manage to register such domain totally unrelated to “travel” industry unless he was a  dentist specifically for travellers.

Any how, I believed the domain was sold to an end user.

Pooling New Names…

Here’s the pick of the lister at Pool for Monday September 28. The top of the trees for the latest Pool list is TahoeTrails.net, a great travel and geo name. A new name is DevilTube.com could be a satanic take on youtube.com. LawsuitFunding.net could be an amazing directory or startup enterprise. 2q2.com leads the small character names derby.

Domainers Scowl at ICANN junket dollars

ICANN now spends 22% of its budget on travel and meetings in far-flung locales worldwide. Is it looking to build grass-roots support for its decisions or using its growing financial resources to influence various power players in the domain name community?

The group responsible for managing the Web’s domain name system, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), has grown in the 11 years since its inception to become a powerful organization with a nearly $55 million budget built on the domain registration fees it receives.