Long and bulky website names are getting out of fashion.
The first tourist information offices appeared in Europe in the late 1800s. They grew alongside the development of rail travel. France and Switzerland had some of the first visitors bureaus around 1880.
National tourism organisations formed in the early 1900s. Today these organisations are called DMOs (Destination Marketing Organisations).
Between 1994 and 1999, with the arrival of the internet, Destination Marketing Organisations decided to create websites. However, many were a little late and missed the registration of the best .com domain names.
The first tourism websites appeared in 1994.
In the early internet years, the most desired domains were pure geographic domains, such as country.com or city.com.
NewYork.com was registered on 24-11-1995.
London.com was registered on 07-11-1997.
Paris.com was registered on 05-01-1998.
These domains were often registered before governments or tourism boards understood the value of domain names. Domain investors were faster than tourist boards and very quickly all major “countrynames.com” or “citynames.com” domains were no longer available for fresh registration.
Very high prices were asked by early domain investors, too expensive for many tourist boards to adopt.
Today these pure geo domains are used less frequently, as many of them do not resolve to high-quality tourism websites.
Many tourist boards started to adopt internet addresses in an institutional style. Hyphens were also popular.
In California, the tourist board of Mammoth Lakes wanted to create a tourism website.
Mammoth.com had already been registered on 11-07-1994, so the idea came up to add the word “Visit”.
VisitMammoth.com was registered on 14-11-1995.
Mammoth Lakes is a mountain region located about 300 km east of San Francisco.
The Visitors Bureau of Vallejo liked the idea so much that they registered VisitVallejo.com on 17-04-1996.
Vallejo is a town located 39 km north of San Francisco and 55 km south of Santa Rosa.
In 1998 the California Division of Tourism was formed. They initially started a website using an administrative style domain: gocalif.ca.gov.
As the home of many famous brands, California quickly understood that this technocratic domain style was not attractive.
On 10-11-1998 they registered VisitCalifornia.com, which became the new official tourism website.
In some ways California, with its modern understanding of communication, can be seen as the region of the world that launched the “Visit phenomenon”.
Another pioneer is the British Tourist Authority, which registered VisitBritain.com on 24-04-1997.
The iPhone was released on 29-06-2007 and completely changed the way tourists look for travel information.
Years earlier, before 1999, the editor of the Global Visit List had the chance to meet Steve Jobs at Crèmerie de Paris, which at the time was an avant-garde web café.
Jobs explained his idea of a simplified keyboard with fewer buttons, where the “-” hyphen sign would no longer be included.
A decade later, the iPhone made long hyphenated domain names such as hyphenated-internet-addresses.com look outdated.
Around 2003, branding strategies began to appear in many Destination Marketing Organisations (DMOs). Statistics showed that the word “Visit” matched how people actually search for travel information.
Tourist boards therefore started buying Visit + destination domains on the secondary market.
In 2003 the London Tourist Board acquired VisitLondon.com.
In 2011 the Stockholm Tourist Office acquired VisitStockholm.com for 70,000 USD.
In 2011 Berlin Tourismus & Kongress, now called Visit Berlin, acquired VisitBerlin.com for 230,000 USD.
In 2014 the Dubai Department of Commerce and Economy acquired VisitDubai.com for an undisclosed amount.
In 2015 Brand USA acquired VisitTheUSA.com.
In 2004 a domain investor from Norway / Portugal registered hundreds of visitcity.com domains.
Instead of selling them or developing useful content, the domains were redirected to unrelated Norwegian websites.
At its peak in 2011, the Vindheim portfolio owned about 13,400 domains, including hundreds of valuable visitcity.com domains and hundreds of worthless visitcity.tv domains.
These domains were effectively polluting the web and slowing the development of quality tourism information websites.
By 2014, due to annual renewal costs, the spam portfolio began to collapse. One by one the valuable visitcity.com domains — as well as the worthless visitcity.tv domains — became available again for registration.
VisitBregenz.com, now a beautiful tourism website created in 2021, was once part of the spam portfolio.
Bregenz is a city in Austria located on Lake Constance, near the borders of Switzerland and Germany.
In 1999–2000 the project Phone Book of the World was created at the Crèmerie de Paris, an avant-garde web café.
While listing tourist boards around the globe, Phone Book of the World noticed that many official visitors bureaus used surprisingly complicated URLs.
During the COVID period a beautiful cedar tree with a view of the Eiffel Tower was scheduled to be cut down for a real-estate project.
Saving it seemed impossible, but the power of internet communication was activated.
After learning more about the history and cultural value of the “Cèdre Impérial”, the mayor of the city changed his mind and decided to save it.
This experience inspired the idea that beautiful tourism websites and the promotion of cultural heritage could help protect small historical treasures.
Phone Book of the World therefore started to promote Visit-style tourism websites and created a first Visit list.
This list eventually became the more developed Global Visit List, created on 24-08-2024.
More coming soon.
Visit+Destination.com domains — a joker for a local business