I agree that to get anywhere .Travel would have to be completely unregulated and cheap to register. The same applies to .Pro which I have invested heavily in over the last 3-4 months. The threat of bankrupcy will surely force niche registries like Tralliance to lift their restrictions otherwise they have no future.
Presumably, the pressure not to do that comes from ICANN and not the registry because it's obvious that domains and especially alternative extensions are very price elastic, if you lower the reg fee you get a disproportionately higher increase in registrations so total registry revenue increases.
Affilia understood this dynamic when they reduced the price of .info domains to $0 to $2 for long periods. They have 5m registrations now and people are prepared to pay $10 to hold onto them. Assuming a 50/50 split with the registrars, that's $25m of income for the registry.
My mantra is alternative extensions are an inferior product and should be priced accordingly if you want internet users to switch from .com and more established alternative extensions. People will not develop Mortgage.zzz if nobody takes the .zzz extension seriously.
Extensions develop because domain speculators bat premium keywords between eachother until an aftermarket develops, scarcity and speculation drives up values to the point where developers start developing them and end users start recognising them.
When registries invent a new extension and say it's special because only people with 1 leg and red hair can register it, they are deluding themselves by thinking their target market are going to develop it for them. Extension development doesn't work like that. People with 2 legs and brown hair stick with .com and a handful of 1 legged redheads pick up some good keywords and park them. There is no speculation, no aftermarket, and no development.
The masters of hype, speculation, and alchemy are the .Mobi registry mTLD and their supporters. They have taken a dodgy sounding, hyped up extension with a questionable raison d'etre and played it like a Stradivarius with records sale announcements, auctions, and auction server crashes fanning the flames of lustful acquisitiveness. This isn't a criticism, it's exactly what a registry and its early stage speculators should do.
I have several issues with .Travel.
1) The extension itself is too long, it's another keyword, not just an extension.
2) Domains like Italy.Travel and France.Travel are logical with excellent goodness of fit but most people want to select where they travel and to get economies of scale travel companies offer travel to hundreds of destinations. I can't see sites like Italy.Travel being anything more than mom and pop small scale enterprises or traffic drivers because of the competitive nature of the industry.
3) Alternative extensions aren't trusted by the average Internet user. This is a real problem with travel because you are paying up front but not travelling until a future date, hence more trust is required.
4) The range of premium keywords is very narrow, pretty much limited to where people travel to. With other alternative extensions, there is multi-sector appeal. The volume of alternative extension domains changing hands every year is a tiny fraction of total domains registered so with fewer star keywords, and few domains registered, aftermarket activity and in turn extension development will be restricted.
5) .Travel has less international appeal than other extensions. Travel is an English word, in French it's Voyage and in Spanish it's Viajes. In contrast, other alternative extensions, like .Info, .Org, and .Pro are more internationally recognised because they are the first 3 or 4 letters of the extension's meaning in dozens of languages.
