messy business

Messy business: AFTA & ATIA

Stories of competition, contention, and confusion from the .au namespace

Paul Middleton

Dec 1, 2024 — 1 min read

AFTA is was the Australian Federation of Travel Agents, which was founded in 1957. In August 2023, AFTA rebranded to the Australia Travel Industry Association (ATIA).

ATIA has the atia.travel domain name registered, which it uses for its emails, but they still choose to use the afta.com.au domain name for their website. Browser traffic to atia.travel redirects to afta.com.au.

We have no idea why they don't choose to use atia.travel, but we do know that atia.com.au is owned by the Australian Taxi Industry Association (ATIA), so maybe this is a factor.

Just to add to the mix, the Australia Fishing Trade Association (AFTA) owns the afta.net.au domain name.

Both AFTAs above are associations, so why aren't they using the .asn.au namespace? Because afta.asn.au has been registered by Advocates For The Aged (though we couldn't find a website using that domain).

Note: atia.asn.au was available to register at the time of writing.

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