Travel Reservations Srl has notified ICANN that it no longer intends to use the new .HOTELES, .VUELOS and .PASSAGENS delegated gTLDs. The event would be quite ordinary if we were talking about branded domains, which companies regularly refuse. However, all of the listed domains are not closed - registration in them would be available to everyone if the company bothered to open this registration. Moreover, all three names of domain zones are commonly used dictionary words: hoteles in Spanish means "hotels", vuelos - "tickets", and passagens is translated from Portuguese as "travel".
This makes the situation almost unique. Travel Reservations Srl is a subsidiary of Despegar, Latin America's largest online booking service for tickets and hotels. It must be admitted that the company has never hidden that it really does not know what to do with its domains: already in the application for them, filed in 2012, it was indicated that Despegar intends to wait for time and see how new domains will develop in order to decide using their own. Obviously, after waiting 10 years, the company has not found an answer to this question. However, waiting is, in general, it seems, the “trademark” of Despegar. Domain Incite, reporting this news, draws attention to the fact that a notice of relinquishment of domain management was sent to ICANN in January of this year. It is dated November 6, 2020.
On the positive side of this story, unlike branded domains, regular domains are not permanently removed from the root zone without the possibility of re-delegation. And if during the next phase of the new domains program someone wishes to register one of the named domains, they can be delegated again.
