Donuts may make .travel names easier to buy after acquiring its first legacy gTLD
Donuts has added .travel to its swelling portfolio of gTLDs, under a deal with original registry Tralliance announced today.
It’s the company’s first acquisition of a legacy, pre-2012 gTLD, and the first “community” gTLD to join its stable of strings, which now stands at 239.
.travel went live in 2005, a part of ICANN’s 2003 round of “sponsored” TLD applications.
As a sponsored TLD, .travel has eligibility and authentication requirements, but executive vice president Jon Nevett told DI that Donuts will look at “tinkering with” the current process to make domains easier to buy.
The current system requires what amounts to basically a self-declaration that you belong to the travel community, he said, but you have to visit the registry’s web site to obtain an authentication code before a registrar will let you buy a .travel domain.
Given that the community captured by .travel is extremely broad — you could be somebody blogging about their vacations and qualify — it seems to be a barrier of limited usefulness.
Nevett said Donuts has no immediate plans to migrate the TLD away from the Neustar back-end upon which it currently sits.
The rest of its portfolio runs on its own in-house registry platform, and one imagines that .travel will wind up there one day.
While .travel is one of Donuts most-expensive domains — priced at $99 retail at its own Name.com registrar — Nevett said there are no plans to cut pricing as yet.
There may be discounts, he said, and possibly promotions involving bundling with other travel-related gTLDs in its portfolio.
Donuts already runs .city, .holiday, .flights, .cruises, .vacations and several other thematically synergistic name spaces.
.travel had about 18,000 domains registered at the last count, with EnCirca, Name.com, 101domain, Key-Systems and CSC Corporate as its top five registrars.
It peaked 10 years ago at just under 215,000 registrations, largely due to to speculative bulk registrations made by parties connected to the registry that were dumped a couple of years later.
It’s been at under 20,000 names for the last five years, shrinking by small amounts every year.
The price of the acquisition was not disclosed.
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