The generic holiday.com domain name is up for auction after its current owners decided to cash in on their investment. The holiday.com domain name is being described as “the ‘Holy Grail’ of the travel industry” by Breathe Luxury, the company overseeing the auction.
Here on the Broadband Cloud Solutions we have covered super-valuable domains many times, but it is always a little exciting to see a record broken in our industry. The starting bid in the holiday.com auction is set at $5 million (US dollars), but some experts suggest that the final sale price could be much, much higher.
Some way to go to reach record breaker status
The current holder of the world’s most valuable domain name title is sex.com which sold for £8.1 million ($13 million US dollars) back in 2010. Holiday.com would need to achieve almost three times its opening price to take the record.
Other domain names, like insurance.com and vacationrentals.com sold for considerably more (£21 million), but each included the transfer of ownership of an existing business too. In the case of holiday.com, it is just the website address itself that is up for sale.
However Breathe.com reports that there have been several attempts to buy holiday.com over the years. The current owners, an unspecified American company, have held the rights to the domain for the past 16 years, but are now selling because it “has finally accepted it cannot afford the investment needed to turn it into a viable business.”
Proving the value of holiday.com
To help justify the opening valuation of holiday.com, Breathe Luxury have posted some proof points. The promotional website proudly claims “The keyword ‘Holiday’ is so widely searched on major search engines that over 90% of online travel businesses are using ‘holiday’ as one of their top 5 keywords search term, to reach customers online.”
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Breathe Luxury’s managing director Farad Laaforce claimed somewhat ominously that travel companies had to bid in the auction “they will lose their market share once holiday.com goes live.” But although search engines place a high value on single word domains when indexing and prioritising results, there are many other factors involved in boosting rankings. As web hosting expert Richard Winslow said about the sale, “You need to have a business plan and to be able to use the name and market it effectively.”
What happens next?
The domain auction was due to take place in London on November 5th but was postponed by Breathe Luxury at the last minute due to “reasons beyond our control”. Although the sale is due to be rescheduled, no further details have emerged. In the meantime anyone still interested in buying the domain name should contact Breathe Luxury via the details listed on holiday.com – just remember that you will still need a cool $5 million to get a piece of the action.
For more affordable alternatives, why not check out one of the new generic top level domain names (gTLD) available from Broadband Cloud Solutions?
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