An Ohio tourism industry member, who owns and operates an Inn in the Hocking Hills, asked recently about the new .travel web domain. She wondered if registering/purchasing a new URL would be worthwhile.

I did a little research on the internet and found that for the most part the domain hasn't been used much since being made available in 2005. Sites using the .travel domain aren't indexed by Google and other major search engines. That certainly makes a difference. There is a "travel specific" search engine that makes use of the domain, www.search.travel, but it hasn't become very popular yet.

So what are your thoughts? Are there any of our industry members out there using the .travel domain? Are you seeing results? Would you recommend it to others?