Departure dot-com: The Ultimate Premium Travel Domain

UPDATE August 2022: We have recently acquired departure.net and will be including it with any sale of depature.com!

Departure: [noun] the action of leaving, especially to start a journey.

It's time for Departure dot-com (Departure) to start its next journey (and departure.net is coming along too). Departure has had only one owner that has retained control of the domain since the 1990s. A lot has changed since then! There was no Google yet. Your cell phone (if you had one) looked more like a brick and you certainly didn't browse the web with it. If you had the latest and greatest technology for web browsing, it was probably done on your brand new 1st gen Apple iMac. You probably watched Friends on your tube TV (not DVRed), and maybe even jammed out to NSYNC (come on... you know you did). And most relevant to Departure, at the time it was purchased; not a single travel related booking had been researched, procured, and paid for directly by a consumer using a website yet (Microsoft's Expedia would go live in mere months). Think about all that for a second. The world was a different place for sure. Now it is time for Departure to change too.  

One thing that has certainly changed over the years is the travel industry. The internet revolutionized travel researching, booking, and logistics in ways that we could have never imagined. And it's not done yet. With no near third, and combined sales well over $100 billion, the two top earning travel companies (not websites) are Expedia and Priceline. These two internet based companies changed the game for how we travel. Expedia (Expedia Group) owns familiar names such as: Travelocity, Hotwire, Orbitz, Trivago, CheapTickets, ebookers, Hotels.com, CarRentals.com, Vacation Rental by Owner (Vrbo), Egencia, CruiseShipCenters, Classic Vacations, and more. Similarly, Priceline (Booking Holdings) owns names such as: Booking.com, Kayak, Rentalcars.com, agoda, and OpenTable. If you haven't used one of these services to book some sort of travel, be it a flight, hotel, home rental, restaurant reservation, or even an entire vacation, you probably haven't left the house in the past decade. This explosion of web-based travel technology has made it simple to search, purchase, and get to your travel destinations. And it's only going to get better.

Interestingly, with all the holdings between Expedia and Priceline, not one of them owns a plane, private jet (at least that you can get on), hotel, beach house, villa, restaurant, cruise ship, private yacht, or any of the other things you actually use when traveling. They just make it easier to get there! And they are doing it using the internet. Most of these sites take all the major airlines, hotel chains, car rentals, cruise lines, or other travel accommodation to provide the consumer with a complied viewing of the many options that they can directly choose and book from. Even luxury travel has moved to web-based platforms. Whether you want to join into a group that offers membership in fractional ownership of private jets or peruse the interior of a private yacht, you are most likely going to start on the internet first. Technology developed for the internet has made it all too easy for us to research, make, and manage our own travel accommodations.

As revolutionary as these internet companies have been for travel, the revolution is far from over. If you haven't heard already, blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) based technologies are coming. AI and Blockchain are going to take the travel industry to a whole new level. The now fractured, inefficient, and sometimes unsecured mechanisms that move money and data for the travel industry are going to realize a new level of efficiency and security once AI and blockchain make their way in. Working to integrate and secure the complex chain of events and transactions happening behind the scenes, blockchain will make things much easier and safer for not only the consumers, but also for the companies providing booking platforms, the actual travel service providers themselves, security providers, governmental agencies, as well as entrepreneurs looking to develop new travel sites. AI is going to take efficiency in travel booking and logistics to another level as well (Expedia is already using it). With upstarts such as Winding Tree already making a splash and attracting big name travel providers, you can bet that blockchain is going to have a big impact on the entire travel industry.

The internet has also made the world a lot more competitive. Have you ever even been to a physical travel agency before? Probably not. When was the last time you called a phone number to check on an arrival/departure time or flight status? I bet you can't remember. A strong presence on the web drives business to you and it works tirelessly 24/7 (with no complaining). Think for a second; how many popular travel sites use directly related domain names? Not many. You don't have to be a marketing expert to know that building a brand with an obscure name from nothing is challenging, slow, and expensive. So how much business are we talking about here? In 2018 alone, direct and indirect travel produced a global economic contribution of $8.8 trillion, and is growing fast. Not bad. The question is: How much of that pie can a premium travel domain like departure.com bring you or your company? The answer is: A lot (if you know how to use it). Departure can provide a clear and competitive advantage on many levels.

"Departure" is a premium one-word domain that is ready to become your brand. Single name domains with any relevance to any industry are long gone. And once departure.com is sold, for whatever purpose (travel or otherwise), it will likely never see the market again as a raw domain name. This is a one time opportunity. Departure's power comes from its all encompassing name. All trips, no matter what the destination or means of transportation, start with a departure. And all travel related searches begin at your physical point of departure. This makes the single word: "departure", the most encompassing term to all of travel. Arguably, the Departure domain could be the most relevant and encompassing domain name in the entire travel industry. And there is only one Departure dot-com.

With travel related domains selling at premium price points, you can be sure that Departure will too. Like all things bought and sold, they are worth what someone is willing to pay you for them. As part of that, rarity is a huge factor. By their very nature, each dot-com address is a one-of-a-kind, making them both unique and rare. There is, and will only be, one departure.com. As rare as premium domains are, so are their prospective buyers. The sale of Departure will need the right buyer, with the right venture, at the right time. Until that time, it will remain right where it is, waiting patiently for the right opportunity. So please, only inquire if you are ready to enter into a serious acquisition process with serious money (no crypto currency). If you think that Departure is ready to start your next journey, send it a message at domain@departure.com and see where it takes you.           

Still reading? Want to read more? Here are some interesting articles related to the history of travel on the web:

The most expensive ones (Fortunly 2021): The Most Expensive Domain Names Ever Sold
Everyone loves an infographic (Mashable 2012): The Evolution of Online Travel
The short and sweet (The Guardian 2014): How 25 years of the Web inspired the travel revolution
The loooong story (Skift): The Definitive Oral History of Online Travel (with Podcast)

Still reading? Here are some possible uses for Departure:

Looking for comps? Good luck. The overwhelming majority of domain sales are done privately and the details are never disclosed (~90% according to the experts). Other relevant domain names had developed a significant business around them when they sold. If you poke around, you can find a few relevant tidbits here and there on raw domain name sales. However, most of the sales that were made public are very dated and don't relate to today's market, as any relevant domain names (and even a few obscure ones) were scooped up long ago. But to save you some time, here is a compiled list of travel related raw domain name sales, most of which are 10+ years old now:

Sources:
https://financesonline.com/top-10-most-expensive-domain-names-in-the-world-insurance-rentals-private-jets/
https://www.domainholdings.com/recent-sales/highest-domain-sales-of-all-time/
https://namecorp.com/most-expensive-domain-name-sales-of-all-time/

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