Why did United disable ual.com? Did they simply forget to renew the registration?

They only brand themselves as United, no need for UAL.

Companies don't let go of old domain names because they do not match the current branding. For one thing, they might want to go back to it one day in the future, for another, they do not want competitors or others trying to grab the domain name and take traffic away or harm the company (see how long United has been trying to take over untied.com).

United still owns the ual.com domain. It looks as though it was set up to redirect to united.com but there are errors in the dns records. Whether those errors are intentional (it happens for a variety of reasons) or not, I could not say for a fact, but I'd suspect they're not.

It's now redirecting to United.com again.

ikolkyo wrote:

They only brand themselves as United, no need for UAL.

Verizon Wireless doesn't brand themselves as VZW, but the vzw.com domain is owned and active. Delta still owns and re-directs nwa.com to their website. Just because a company does not use it for branding (obviously) in advertising,doesn't mean there is no need for it. UAL.com is a valuable domain and they'll keep it as they have for over 22 years.

TWA302 wrote:

ikolkyo wrote:

They only brand themselves as United, no need for UAL.

Verizon Wireless doesn't brand themselves as VZW, but the vzw.com domain is owned and active. Delta still owns and re-directs nwa.com to their website. Just because a company does not use it for branding (obviously) in advertising,doesn't mean there is no need for it. UAL.com is a valuable domain and they'll keep it as they have for over 22 years.

Not to mention, domain names are cheap (once you have them). You're talking about $10-20/year. Better for them to keep it than to lose it and have UAL.com go to a website that decides to bash the United brand image.

UAL.com stopped redirecting to united.com *months* ago.

It was definitely used in advertising until sometime in the early to mid 2000s. I get why they stopped advertising it, but I don't know why they stopped the redirect. Old habits die hard, and I used to type ual.com in all the time.

Glad to know I'm not crazy. I tried going to ual.com to book a ticket a month or so ago and didn't get me there. I figured it was on my end.

TWA302 wrote:

Verizon Wireless doesn't brand themselves as VZW, but the vzw.com domain is owned and active. Delta still owns and re-directs nwa.com to their website. Just because a company does not use it for branding (obviously) in advertising,doesn't mean there is no need for it. UAL.com is a valuable domain and they'll keep it as they have for over 22 years.

I'm going to kick it way old school here but type in valujet.com and enjoy the redirect.

N776AU wrote:

I'm going to kick it way old school here but type in valujet.com and enjoy the redirect.

Interesting that ValuJet.com works, but Airtran.com takes you to an error page.

If they really let it go, that would be seriously dumb. Someone would pick it up immediately and if they wanted it back they would have to PAY MILLIONS for it. ALL 2, 3 and 4 letter combinations and .com (and most others like .org and such) have been taken since the earliest days of the internet. I'm sure we all know the exxonmoble.com fiasco. At Landor, someone in the early 90's was smart and quick enough to get branding.com...which takes you to landor.com.

Getting united.com must have been tough unless someone was really bright at UAL got it just after Al Gore invented the internet! I would assume every big airline owns as many versions of their brand as xxxx.com as possible including name plus "sucks.com" I just checked friendlyskies.com and it goes nowhere. There is a chance they own it and block it.

VC10er wrote:

If they really let it go, that would be seriously dumb. Someone would pick it up immediately and if they wanted it back they would have to PAY MILLIONS for it. ALL 2, 3 and 4 letter combinations and .com (and most others like .org and such) have been taken since the earliest days of the internet. I'm sure we all know the exxonmoble.com fiasco. At Landor, someone in the early 90's was smart and quick enough to get branding.com...which takes you to landor.com.

Getting united.com must have been tough unless someone was really bright at UAL got it just after Al Gore invented the internet! I would assume every big airline owns as many versions of their brand as xxxx.com as possible including name plus "sucks.com" I just checked friendlyskies.com and it goes nowhere. There is a chance they own it and block it.

https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name= ... yskies.com tells us that indeed United Airlines has this registration, and has held it since 1999.

ChristopherS wrote:

N776AU wrote:

I'm going to kick it way old school here but type in valujet.com and enjoy the redirect.

Interesting that ValuJet.com works, but Airtran.com takes you to an error page.

Works fine for me - redirects to southwest.com, just as one would expect.

nwa.com gets you right to delta.com

Twa.com is down.

blueflyer wrote:

Companies don't let go of old domain names because they do not match the current branding. For one thing, they might want to go back to it one day in the future, for another, they do not want competitors or others trying to grab the domain name and take traffic away or harm the company (see how long United has been trying to take over untied.com).

United does seem to have a particularly high number of domains they seem to be protecting, especially with Polaris in the name. Ones with rather negative connotations, that is.

blacksoviet wrote:

Twa.com is down.

A quick whois shows that AA still owns it though. My guess is that the fact the acquisition happened relatively long ago and the fact that online booking wasn't that popular at the time anyways makes it rather unlikely anyone actually tries to go to the domain, so they don't bother with the redirect.

VC10er wrote:

...UAL got it just after Al Gore invented the internet!

Al Gore? Is this a wide spread myth in the US? I do hope I'm just not getting the irony here

/Fredrik

[*]

FredrikHAD wrote:

VC10er wrote:

...UAL got it just after Al Gore invented the internet!

Al Gore? Is this a wide spread myth in the US? I do hope I'm just not getting the irony here

/Fredrik

Al Gore claimed responsibility for creating the Internet.

FredrikHAD wrote:

VC10er wrote:

...UAL got it just after Al Gore invented the internet!

Al Gore? Is this a wide spread myth in the US? I do hope I'm just not getting the irony here

/Fredrik

Al Gore once said in an interview with CNN:

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

What he was saying was that as a Senator he helped fund and nurture the Internet, but his political adversaries twisted this into saying he claimed to invent the Internet, which he never did.

So, yeah, it is a wide spread myth, but #fakenews.

Ref: http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp

MD88CLE wrote:

blueflyer wrote:

Companies don't let go of old domain names because they do not match the current branding. For one thing, they might want to go back to it one day in the future, for another, they do not want competitors or others trying to grab the domain name and take traffic away or harm the company (see how long United has been trying to take over untied.com).

United does seem to have a particularly high number of domains they seem to be protecting, especially with Polaris in the name. Ones with rather negative connotations, that is.

blacksoviet wrote:

Twa.com is down.

A quick whois shows that AA still owns it though. My guess is that the fact the acquisition happened relatively long ago and the fact that online booking wasn't that popular at the time anyways makes it rather unlikely anyone actually tries to go to the domain, so they don't bother with the redirect.

AA should have left the old TWA site up for historical records.

ChristopherS wrote:

N776AU wrote:

I'm going to kick it way old school here but type in valujet.com and enjoy the redirect.

Interesting that ValuJet.com works, but Airtran.com takes you to an error page.

Airtran.com goes to southwest still.
https://www.southwest.com/?ref=airtrain.com

But I think they still hold "coair.com"

Speaking of Polaris, that use to be the name of the NWA reservations system.

United uses the ual.com for in house purposes, like employee travel, crew scheduling and so on. It is not retired.

blacksoviet wrote:

Why did United disable ual.com? Did they simply forget to renew the registration?

They could still own it, just disabled it.

rbavfan wrote:

blacksoviet wrote:

Why did United disable ual.com? Did they simply forget to renew the registration?

They could still own it, just disabled it.

Like I said, they still have it active in house for employees (the crew scheduling, employee reservations and other items). It just does not forward to united.com

intotheair wrote:

UAL.com stopped redirecting to united.com *months* ago.

It was definitely used in advertising until sometime in the early to mid 2000s. I get why they stopped advertising it, but I don't know why they stopped the redirect. Old habits die hard, and I used to type ual.com in all the time.

It was working in late December when I booked a trip. That is how I always get to their site. I would at least expect them to put in a time delayed redirect to gradually get people to switch to the long URL.

It seems odd because ual.com will redirect to united.com on my desktop, but it times out on my phone and laptop. At any rate, they do still seem to own the domain.

Mods, can you please lock this thread? The site in question still redirects to United.com, there is no reason for this thread to exist.

Rdh3e wrote:

Mods, can you please lock this thread? The site in question still redirects to United.com, there is no reason for this thread to exist.

Some people may be interested discussing this topic, including the reasoning and purpose of why UA may or may not decide to do something. You shouldn't recommend the closure of a thread just because you're not interested in the discussion. FYI, it does not redirect for me.

Anyway, to get back on topic, I would be surprised to see UA retire this even though its not used in the current brand. Aside from in house services from running on it, I can't imagine the domain costing them much money in the grand scheme of things.

Delete Delete Delete

VC10er wrote:

Getting united.com must have been tough unless someone was really bright at UAL got it just after Al Gore invented the internet! I would assume every big airline owns as many versions of their brand as xxxx.com as possible including name plus "sucks.com"

For the longest time, delta.com was owned by Delta Faucets. DAL had to make do with delta-air.com. At some point they must have reached a deal - probably pretty lucrative for Delta Faucets.

And yes, I did some DNS work one time for a large company (not an airline) and they owned over 600 domains, mostly variations on CompanyXsucks.com, CompanyXisShit.com, CompanyX'sCEOisajerk.com...you get the drift
They all redirected to the main site ( actually they were all CNAME's).

Why does rdh3e want this thread deleted?

blacksoviet wrote:

Why does rdh3e want this thread deleted?

Ignore him. There always seems to be one person that would rather waste their time complaining rather than just moving on to a thread that interests them. And what rta said.

USAir.com doesn't work anymore, although USAirways.com does.

USAir.com is assigned to an IP in a /27 that is assigned to America West via AT&T.

AmericaWest.com doesn't work anymore either, although its a CNAME for webredirector.usairways.com which is assigned to an IP that is assigned to American.

If I were to guess, a lot of this just boils down to someone having to care about it, and its waaaay down on a list of things that need to be done. Putting in redirects is pretty easy, it just has to be done.

In 25 years, I bet AA will still own usair.com and twa.com. They may even find some in-house use for the domains.