.TRAVEL founder resigns

katherine · Jul 23, 2007

Source: http://www.domainesinfo.fr/english/81/travel-founder-resigns.php

Ron Andruff, the man who created .TRAVEL and its registry Tralliance, has decided the time is right for him to 'pursue new opportunities and interests'.

Ron Andruff
Ron Andruff's departure was announced on July 20th through a Tralliance press release. "The Company continues to be led by Michael Egan, Chairman and Ed Cespedes, CEO, who took steps to expand and reorganize the Company last year," the release said.

The specialist site Internet Travel News has a more detailed explanation for Andruff's decision. "My vision, I have to admit is different from the current management team," Andruff is quoted as saying. "I have always supported a long term grass roots empowerment model â whereas they seem to be more focused on the search.travel component."

Despite these differences in strategy, Andruff remains very optimistic about .TRAVEL and points out that Tralliance "hit all our targets and achieved a tremendous amount in a short space of time."

Passion

The past couple of years, Andruff became a familiar face at ICANN meetings and other Internet conferences as he championed the travel industry's dedicated top level domain. Andruff has worked passionately these past few years to get .TRAVEL off the ground.

The registry contract was signed by Tralliance (the name is a concatenation of "travel alliance") and ICANN on May 5th, 2005 and the domain was launched later that year, first through a sunrise system, before become generally available in early 2006.

The latest unofficial .TRAVEL statistics obtained by Domaines.info puts the suffix at around 20,000 to 25,000 names. But if anyone from Tralliance is reading this, we would love to have the official registration statsâ¦