Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Problems with dot-travel domains

There have been some interesting developments in the world of the dot-travel domain in recent days.

The excellent Travel-Rants blog reports how one company has had difficulties with customers seeing its dot-travel tagged site.

Lee Harrison from Selectworld.travel, which featured here on the Travolution Blog earlier this week, says some UK ISPs are having problems.

Overseas users are apparently able to see UK-based dot-travel sites, including Selectworld.travel, but there does seem to be an issue somewhere.

Regardless of the technical difficulties, the dot-travel domain is not without its detractors.

In Travolution’s recent feature on dot-travel, journalist David Bicknell found research group Forrester were less than impressed with the system, hitting out at the accreditation scheme (“flawed”) and labelling the concept “nice, but not necessary”.

In the meantime, Harrison contacted Tralliance, the company behind the dot-travel domain system, to get some answers.

This is what Tralliance said: "The people having difficulty accessing your site should contact their respective ISPs. Most often this is a result of spam filters but they should definitely contact the ISPs. Please do contact us if the problem persists.

"It is not true that this is a problem across the board for .travel registrants in the UK, but it is limited to a very few pockets of the UK. If you have any other questions or experience any problems, please let me know."

Please let us know if you have experienced any problems with dot-travel domains.

The debate rumbles on...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm starting to get quite a few comments on the subject, if you visit .travel domain issue

Tralliance have said it's because of spam filters - sorry, but I completely disagree with that, personally I think it's to do with DNS, and they need to work with UK ISP's to resolve this issue.

I have emailed orange support tonight and I'll let you know when I get a response.

Ralph Foulds said...

Interesting to find and read these posts.
I've been looking into problems with the dot travel domain name after being concerned about the effects of having one ourselves.

We've ditched 3 of our original dot travel domains, partly because of the cost, which seems excessive, partly because of the seeming lack of promotion of the domain name to the public, and also because of technical problems with it.
The one I'd like to highlight here is that I can't find any dot travel domain names with any kind of Google Page Rank.
We still have a .travel domain name on our main site (www.uncovertheworld.travel) and this has lost its page rank since changing from .co.uk, and also lost traffic as well.
We were hoping and expecting that the opposite would be the case, with improved search results from travel related search terms, because of the supposed higher relevance and importance of the dot travel domain name.

I don't get the impression that Tralliance are doing as much as they can to sort these things out.

Anyone else having issues with dot travel and Google ?

Anonymous said...

am still working on www.res.travel and google is really killing us!!
why he is not listing any .travel ?!!

Anonymous said...

Google is the best
he is indexing www.res.travel now

thanks google :-)