The domain name krugernationalpark.com is not owned by SANParks, the government body tasked with managing national parks in South Africa. Considering that they handle reservations in-house such a domain name would be generating additional bookings for Kruger National Park which are currently not exploited.
- photo by Arno & Louise Wildlife
Below are my reasons why I think SANParks is leaving money on the table:
- The domain name krugernationalpark.com is currently not developed, but parked.
- The keyword “kruger national park” attracts 14,800 local and 33,100 global monthly searches respectively.
- SANParks could approach the rightful owner (a US based company) and negotiate to buy domain outright.
- Once domain is in the hands of SANParks, it could be used as a vehicle to exclusively sell the Kruger National Park.
- According to Valuate.com, the domain is worth around $8,600 (obviously the owner would demand far more than that) and whatever price tag is negotiated, it would be a huge return on investment.
- It would make business sense for SANParks to actually ensure that all Kruger National Park exact keyword domains are owned in-house.
Selling a tourism product doesn’t have to only rely on one website in-house…using targeted multiple websites is spreading the chances of improving bookings. For some unknown reasons the majority of tourism operators sell their products through a single in-house website and that is short sighted.
Blogger Muzi Mohale
I’m Muzi Mohale, based in Roodepoort (South Africa). Blogger with www.travelwires.com. Love Travelwires.com since I get to travel our beautiful country through blogging and get first hand tourism experience.
I disagree – they’d then also need to buy all other domains that are vaguely linked to their many parks. You can bet that many companies like this US one will quickly reserve as many as possible to be able to sell it on at inflated prices to SANparks.
Better be clear and stick to having one domain only, sanparks.org.
Jeff, remember the benefits of using an exact keyword as your domain name:
1. You’re already getting targated traffic without much effort and becomes easy to seal bookings.
2. Instead of enabling external parties take advantage of what such domains present, you’ll be exploiting all it’s potential.
3. Instead of wasting money on expensive short term advertising campaigns, a targeted domain will continue to generate bookings long term.
4. The brand ‘Kruger National Park’ generates 14,000 local searches per month while SANParks received 22,100 local searches. Surely any smart business will want to increase their revenue stream.
Before you register any domain name, a background research first has to be done to check the popularity of that concerned keyword, therefore it wouldn’t make any business sense to secure domains that don’t attract any meaningful targeted traffic.
If all the national parks have popular keyword words like KRUGER, it would be a smart move to secure such domains and develop them into marketing platforms for those concerned parks.