Travel-oriented entities will now have their own address on the Internet: .travel (dot travel).
Under the United Nations-backed tourism initiative, member states will have priority to register the names of their countries, cities and places of tourist interest as also UNESCO-approved heritage sites on the Internet Level Domain (TLD).
The registration will start this autumn and members have until March 31 next year to register before other legitimate travel or tourism entities are allowed to register.
The initiative follows complaints that their names have already been taken by other entities on existing TLD.
Tralliance Corporation, New York, the .travel registry, said it has launched the initiative in cooperation with the World Tourism Organisation.
If other entities have already pre-empted the country's name on the much-used .com TLD, they now have their own travel-oriented TLD.
"Travel and tourism, while a major player on the Internet, have been operating without a clear identity," WTO Deputy Secretary-General Dawid de Villiers said.
".travel domain names will bring enormous visibility to our member states and clarity to all that their destinations have to offer," he said.
The prioritisation, the UN said, will overcome the frustration felt by governments that characterised earlier TLD introductions, wherein many States were pre-empted from registering domain names for their countries, cities, heritage and sacred sites.
"We expect that they (member states) will move swiftly to take advantage of the first domain name priority right ever offered to governments in the history of the Internet," said Tralliance Corporation president and chief executive Ronald N Andruff.
"Travellers, in turn, will have the assurance and confidence of knowing that .travel web sites will, indeed, be official and (provide information about) exactly what they are seeking."
A derivative of the nations' priority right will enable the proper registration of .travel names for the world's largest popular centres to ensure their names are also distributed in a logical fashion.
