Saturday, December 04, 2004
New travel registry set to change online searches
CAPE TOWN - Are you facing the agony of locating an ideal hotel or travel agent over the internet?
You can brace yourself for better times because the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has entered into technical and commercial agreements on a proposed .travel domain name registry.
In this registry, you will find all addresses of hotels, travel agents, and any of the 18 business sectors servicing the global tourism community. It will now be easier to locate hotels or travel agents located in any part of the internet because you will only have to search the .travel domain name data base/directory.
This potentially lucrative contract has been negotiated with an American organisation, Tralliance Corporation. The corporation proposes to service more than a million websites through regional associations and other independent channels.
“Travel spending accounts for more than 28 percent of all online transactions and the travel industry accounts for more than 11 percent of the world's economy, so the time for a .travel domain has clearly arrived,” said Ronald Andruff, Trallince Corporation president and chief executive.
Currently, if you want to find out about modest/cheap hotels in Zanzibar, Tanzania, a search engine will elicit thousands of results ranging from any website with a hotel name or any mention of the word “Zanzibar”.
For this reason, the .travel domain name registry will save users the trouble of sifting through numerous and possibly irrelevant websites before they find what
they want.
National travel associations will authenticate any business wishing to register for a .travel domain name. However, any travel business not directly affiliated to to such a travel association would still be able to register through a separate independent authentication channel. For example, if a private individual uses his own vehicle to ferry tourists to game reserves, but is not member of the association, Tralliance will ask Dun and Bradstreet to verify application details.
Apart from contributing to the Internet growth, the new registry could earn up to US$ 100 million annually from subscriptions alone (assuming all one million
travel business websites are listed on the registry).
Tralliance has proposed to work with The Travel Partnership Corporation (TTPC), a non-profit organisation and a proposed sponsor of the domain registry. TTPC will also assist in policy development required for the new registry.
Reaching Out to Africa
By Thrishni Subramoney
Highway Africa News Agency
ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is holding a major conference in Cape Town as part of its commitment to reach out to internet users around the world.
Theresa Swinehart, ICANN's General Manager in Global Partnerships, said the organisation is doing its best to engage the world by holding its tri-annual meetings in it's five different regions (Africa, Asia, North America, Latin America and Europe) on a rotational basis. This is the fourth time that the ICANN meeting has been held in Africa, and the first time that it has come to South African shores.
“I'm very happy with the response we're getting from the local Internet community. I'm pleased on many levels, firstly, we have an opportunity to inform people about ICANN and what we can and can't do.
Secondly, there is encouraging progress in the developing world, like the creation of AfriNic,” Swinehart said.
However, Clement Dzidonu, Vice Chairperson of the At Large Advisory Committee (an ICANN committee that represents the interests of individual Internet users), said African participation in ICANN is seriously lacking. He attributed this to a lack of knowledge among users about ICANN.
“The response has been poor, mainly because people don't know what ICANN is and what it does. When they realise how much ICANN affects their lives, then they will pay attention. We need to raise awareness,” Dzidonu said.
Uniforum SA director, Calvin Brown says the non-profit organisation helped bring the meeting to South African shores for the benefit of local users.
"A lot of people here who are interested can't attend ICANN meetings because of the cost of travel. So, we thought thought we could help ICANN engage with the
local Internet community. We are very pleased with the response," Brown said.
Keyboard to the future?
The key to the future may well be the one on the computer keyboard.
Or at least, that's the idea you get at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers conference currently underway at the Cape Town Convention Centre
in South Africa.
However, if Internet access is as imperative for survival as the laptop-armed delegates at the ICANN gathering would have us believe, then what about the
fate of Africa – a continent that statistics say has less than a single computer per thousand people?
A version of this question comes to mind at the Cape Town gathering: Is ICANN – a key organization related to Internet governance – doing enough to include the views of developing countries?
ICANN plays a considerable role in managing the Internet by registering and assigning domain names or Internet addresses – making it possible for users to access the information they need quickly and precisely. Based in Marina del Rey, California, the organization draws its roots from the American group – the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).
