The way in which we tag the Internet is changing with the soft launch of the next domain house .travel and the Caribbean, like the rest of the travel industry, is gearing up to make the most of its potential.In the Caribbean, the Caribbean Hotel Association (CHA) has been charged with pre-authenticating any business, individual, or organisation that would like to register a .travel domain name. To be eligible, the entity must conduct business or operations in the Caribbean travel industry.

The .travel Internet domain is now live on the Internet; this is a limited launch of .travel, preceding the official launch, which is planned for January 2006. The partial launch is being conducted to confirm and demonstrate that all .travel systems are operating and functioning as planned.

The limited launch phase is a requirement of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an internationally organised, non-profit corporation that maintains oversight responsibility for the Internet.

“.travel will empower the broad spectrum of the travel industry - from the smallest to the largest players - to better promote their products and services within a universal framework on the Internet,” said Ron Andruff, president and chief executive officer, Tralliance Corporation, the Registry for the .travel sponsored top level domain name.”

CHA is now taking domain name registrations from all eligible Caribbean travel businesses (a full list can be found at www.caribbeanhotels.org).

Only those travel entities that have been authenticated by CHA are eligible to register their name(s). This second phase will carry on through October 27th, which will be the last day of the October pre-authentication period. All those travel entities that are pre-authenticated in October must wait until November 2nd, 2005 before the names they have selected and pre-registered are processed and provisioned.

Starting again on November 2nd, CHA will take pre-authentication submissions through November 26th, with selected (available) domain names being provisioned on December 2nd. The final pre-authentication period will begin on December 2nd and it will end on December 26th. Domain names authenticated in that period can be registered as of
January 1st, 2006.

The full, global launch of the .travel Registry will begin January 1st, 2006.
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