$400 thousand is the starting price for the new gTLD .REISE that will be auctioned off on February 27. As it was reported earlier, domain .REISE is the first among new gTLDs to be put up for sale.
Domain name is a German word which means «travel». Probably, Dotreise registry hoped for large German travel companies when it appointed the annual fee at $180. It didn’t work out: since August last year when the domain entered general availability there were less than 1300 registrations in .REISE domain. The reason of failure could be competition with domain .REISEN managed by Donuts. It practically means the same thing, but the fee is only $25 a year. It should be noted however that .REISEN cannot yet boast about a huge number of registrations as well - only around 4000.
Anyway, Dotreise registry decided to get rid of the domain. Experts believe that the starting price of the auction is too low. Taken into account that only application to ICANN cost $185 thousand and the further registration and domain launch were obviously not cheap it would be a success if Dotreise at least manages to cover its costs.
