Calle Strikes Gold with .CO & Hotels.com Domain Name Portfolio

Many people in the domain investment community have come to know Juan Calle primarily as the CEO of the .CO Registry. He regularly attends various domain conferences and events, and he is the ambassador for the new .CO domain extension, which as already seen over 380,000 registrations in under 2 weeks of being live.

Prior to his involvement with the .CO Registry, Juan was the founder of Straat Investments where he currently serves as the company Chairman (Jose Rasco is STRAAT’s Executive Director and Juan Palacio is the CEO for FederatedTravel.com). The company is invested in real estate, technology, and private equity. According to the Straat Investments website,

STRAAT Investments, along with its affiliates, is a private investment firm with interests around the globe. Through its team of investment and operations professionals, STRAAT creates and invests in companies and entrepreneurial opportunities by leveraging its experience in multiple industries to build long term value. We primarily focus our investments in telecommunications, internet, and real estate.

One of the most impressive investments (to me), is the company’s portfolio of generic hotel domain names. As you may recall, I wrote about Swift Rank’s major investments into the city Hotel/Hotels.com space, spending somewhere around 7 figures in the not so distant past. Straat Investment’s portfolio of these domain names is equally (or maybe even more) impressive.

Included in its Federated Travel portfolio are domain names and websites that include (among many others):

ParisHotels.com
MiamiHotels.com
LondonHotels.com
ChicagoHotels.com
DallasHotels.com
CancunHotels.com
TokyoHotels.com

In speaking with Juan about a domain name I own, his company doesn’t have much interest in selling off its assets. In fact, it would take “a big purchase ($10m +)” for the company to consider selling these high performing websites.

Comments (11)

evan

August 4th, 2010 at 1:46 pm

there are 100, 1 word, .co domains up for sale at Name Jet

http://www.namejet.com/Pages/Auctions/BrowseDomains.aspx?tld=co

Joe

August 4th, 2010 at 2:51 pm

Great names indeed, I love “City + Hotels” domains! That’s why one of the domains I was really after was ChicagoHotels.co, which I eventually managed to get. For a coincidence, Calle’s company owns the .com counterpart.

Elliot

August 4th, 2010 at 2:52 pm

@ Joe

The only downside is that you know his company probably could have bought it if they wanted it

Joe

August 4th, 2010 at 2:54 pm

Sure they could, but it seems they’re just happy with their .com

BFitz

August 4th, 2010 at 5:25 pm

I am just starting to develop some of my city-hotels.com domains. I looked at the cityhotels.CO and even NewYorkHotels.co was available on opening day. I grabbed a couple where the .com counter-part is parked but think the clean cityhotels.com developed will be too hard to surpass in rankings.

roddy

August 4th, 2010 at 7:15 pm

My only .co .. i typed in .com accidently when checking the parked page

Rob Sequin

August 4th, 2010 at 10:48 pm

Whether you choose to develop or flip your city hotels .co domain, it only serves to add value to the city hotels .com domain and NEVER the other way around.

Why would you buy a city hotels .co domain?

The only reason to own any .co is to capture typo traffic or to sell to a great fool.

Apologies to the .1% of registrants that actually plan to develop their .co domain.

Rob

August 5th, 2010 at 1:55 am

I believe that .co will ultimately be up there with .tv and in popularity especially if, as some say, google treats them as international domains. I only purchased about 7 2-letter generics including cowboyhats.co and think that in time they will gain popularity will be used as an alternative to .com, .net and .org and not necesarily because of typo traffic.

TheBigLieSociety

August 5th, 2010 at 11:30 am

Interesting .INFO on .CO
Keep in mind, in the 90s, last century…
http://TheBigLieSociety.com
said there would never be a “Domain Industry”

August 6th, 2010 at 12:55 am

Yes, some dynamite names there.
I’d say London and NewYork hotels.com have to be the 2 best of all hotel domain names to own, and they have both of them.
It would be interesting to know how much traffic they bring in – any chance of asking Juan in an interview Elliott?

Huffington Post Spotlight on .CO Registry and Juan Calle | Elliot's Blog

September 4th, 2010 at 8:05 am