Birth of
"Visitors Bureau"

The first Tourist Information offices
appeared in Europe in the late 1800s

They grew alongside rail travel.
France and Switzerland had the first
Visitors Bureau in 1880

National Tourism Organisations
formed in the early 1900s
Among them France and Italy

Birth of "online"
Tourist Information

The first online sites appeared in 1994

Early examples included Hotel Listings and Travel Tips.

Many Tourist Boards use
an institutional style
with bulky-website-adresses.xx

Some tourist boards
that missed the early years of the internet
make the error
to adopt new niche TLDs
which are introduced with
massive promotion.

Over time all these new TLDs
decline
while .com
becomes more and more
and international standard


hyphens are frequently used

Common patterns:

• citytourism.com

• city-tourism.com

• citytourismboard.org

• city-tourismboard.org

• cityinfo.com
  

• city-tourismus.com
  

Why

• Websites were treated as digital brochures

• Focus on authority, not engagement

• Run mostly by government entities

Birth of
"Visit+destination.com"

The first Visit sites came alive in California,
the place where internet was born
The first one was adopted by the tourist board
of Mammoth Lakes in 1995

1996 more US destinations followed
Rhode Island, Bloomington (Indiana)
and Vallejo (California)

VisitEurope.com
was the first non US destination
registered by the European Travel Comission

Rise of the iphone
making hyphens look obsolete

09-01-2007 Steve Jobs presents the first iphone

The product combines
a phone, ipop and internet device
into one and revolutionises
the way people serach the internet

the Hyphone sign ")" is removed
from the main iphone keybord
maling websites-with-hyphones.com
become more difficult to acces
and soon look obsolete.


Branding of Tourism sites
becomes more popular

Visit matches how
people actually search

2007–2012: Branding begins

Emerging patterns

visitcity.com

• discovercity.com

• explorecity.com

• Mixed use of tourism and verbs

Why

• Tourism marketing became competitive

• SEO mattered more

• Destinations started branding themselves like products
  
  
  

soon all Visit+destination.com
domains are registered

2013–Present: Call-to-Action dominance

Strong growth of:

• visitcity.com

• visitdestination.com

Examples launched or promoted during this era:

• visitlondon.com

• visitdubai.com

• visitoslo.com

• visitsingapore.com

• visiticeland.com

Why this pattern won

1. Action-oriented (“visit” implies travel intent)

2. Language-neutral (easy for non-native speakers)

3. Marketing friendly

4. Short, memorable

5. Works globally across cultures

Phone Book of the World
contributes to the
Visit Phenomenon

2007 founded at the turn of the century
Phone Book of the World
starts to list thousands of
Tourist websites all around the globe.


Phone Book of the World creats a special list
promoting all websites
using the Visit+destination.com style

creation of
GlobalVisitList.com
24-08-2024

visit+destination.com
keeps growing

1. Search behavior changed

Users increasingly search phrases like:

• “visit paris”

• “visit japan”

• “visit barcelona”

This directly reinforces the pattern.

---

2. Tourism boards think like brands now

Modern destination marketing organizations (DMOs):

• Run global ad campaigns

• Need a single, strong brand domain

• Prefer names that work on:

  • billboards

  • social media

  • TV ads

  • QR codes

visitdestination.com performs best across all of those.

Trust & authority transfer

Ironically:

• “visit” sounds promotional

• But users now associate it with official sources

So:

• visitcity.com = likely official

• city-tourism.com = possibly private

That perception didn’t exist 20 years ago — it does now.

Relative Decline
of other Patterns

Yes. visitdestination.com has become significantly more popular over time, and it is now:

• the dominant pattern for new official tourism portals

• the preferred upgrade when old tourism sites rebrand

• Visit+destination.com outshines
  every other domain style
  and turns into a global standard `
  
  active visit sites
  featured by Global Visit List
  912 active visit sites by 31=12=2024
  1.103 active visit sites online by 31-12-2025