Search Engines are here to stay for the internet industry, especially for travel. And one company has this week announced an extra incentive for travel companies to be involved and list their business immediately, by giving 5 free category listings on their search directory. The majority of the general search engine business is held by 3 companies namely Google, Yahoo and MSN. However the competition is really hot-ting up between 2 other specialized search engines, both specific to the travel and tourism business.

Over 28% of on-line transactions are travel related, and over 200,000,000 searches a month are performed specifically for tourism related services and products.

The race to the top of the tourism industry is between "The World's Tourism Search Engine", www.Everything-About-Tourism.com and the recently introduced dot travel ending web sites, www.tralliance.travel.

The competition has become so spirited, the www.Everything-About-Tourism.com website is now giving 5 free category listings for the price of one.
   
The dot travel ending URLs were an early leader in 2006 with tourism businesses hoping for this initiative to be successful, however this website appears to have come to a virtual standstill in recent months, with very few new additions of registrations.

"This could be due to a number of factors," said an industry travel agency manager, Mr. Alberto Grollo. "The high annual cost to register a dot travel domain averages US$140 which has been a big deterrent, together with the lack of strong promotion for the public to search the site. Additionally, many companies using the dot travel endings forvweb sites are allowed listings in irrelevant categories in which they do not specialize," continued the travel agency spokesperson.

On the other hand, the group which is winning with multiple listings over the past months is the www.Everything-About-Tourism.com specialized search engine group. The cost to list on this register is approximately one fifth at US$29 per annum depending on the exchange rate.

When questioned why "The World's Tourism Search Engine" was building so rapidly even without incentives, Mr Tony Young, Vice President Marketing of the business aptly named The World's Specialized Search Engines stated, "Still, approximately 95% of searchers on the net find it hard to find exactly what they are seeking on the web easily. They are looking for alternatives. www.Everything-About-Tourism.com dissects all major categories of individual businesses, leisure activities and sports into specific directories, with all web sites easily found and linked in alphabetical order."    

It is a well known fact, the average browser of the internet finds it hard to extract sites they are looking for because of the many irrelevant sites that appear when their terms are typed into the major general search engine subject search boxes.

Additionally, many businesses do not have their web site domain name the same as their business. Combine this with all the various URL endings available nowadays of .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, .name, .ws, let alone all the different country codes of eg .it, .jp .us, .com.au., and it is no wonder consumers find it hard to decipher their search results.

Mr. Young went on to say, "In the Tourism and Travel industry, there are over 1.3 billion websites on the internet already, and if businesses don't differentiate clearly, and have the exact words in their website name that browsers type into their search engine subject box, it is hard to be found on major search engines.

Plus, any real business that is serious, uses a dotcom ending URL website," continued Mr. Young.

"If consumers can choose one specific search engine that relates to the business they are searching, at the same time receiving reliable alphabetical lists of the category they require, they will turn to this option of specific searching every time. This, combined with a very low cost to list of only $25 per year, is why www.Everything-About-Tourism.com has been so successful with listings in recent months," concluded Mr. Young.    

The www.Everything-About-Tourism.com search engine boasts 70 categories in over 200 countries from which to choose, with individual classifications from 5 star resorts, national parks, through to tour operators of all kinds.

For further information, please contact PRASP - Public Relations And Sales Promotions, Email: prasp(at)austourism.com.au or Telephone: +61 7 3832 5566.