.tel Story of Jemima Garthwaite

Jemima Garthwaite, part of search marketing team at Cheapflights.co.uk, also looks after social media activity in the UK. "It involves quite a mixture of creative and technical skills and keeps me very busy! I recently set up Cheapflights' .tel page, but also have a personal page too. Cheapflights is a flights comparison website founded in the UK over 14 years ago, now with eight active websites across Europe, North America and Oceania."

"For Cheapflights.co.uk, being discoverable on the internet is absolutely essential and forms the backbone of our business. Over half of our traffic comes from rankings in the major search engines. We're very active on Twitter, and Flickr, we just launched a Cheapflights Facebook page, and are continually looking to expand our social media activity outwards. Each week we ask our followers to tell us a destination they'd like to know more about, and we then choose a photo from Flickr to suit (which goes on our Twitter page's background). This creates the week's theme for our Twitter and Facebook pages, and I love it because I get to learn about a new destination or type of travel. This week it's California, and next week's is Air Activities (ballooning, sky diving etc.)"

"My first encounter with .tel is a funny story. My brother is an actor and was cast as the business man in the advert that is currently doing the rounds. I bought Jemima.tel immediately, and Cheapflights was equally quick off the mark. As an individual I immediately saw the benefit of having a very short URL to hand out as your business card. I also liked the idea that as a business using social media, I can create pages on the fly on my .tel domain containing content that is suited to user requests received through social networks. For example, a page with the contact details for all airlines flying in and out of the UK wasn't something I thought of immediately, but is clearly a very handy page to have in a mobile format."

"Setting up a .tel domain is remarkably easy, fool-proof even. It loads incredibly quickly on my iPhone, and I like that users who travel regularly can have different profiles for when they are in different countries. This will immediately tell anyone wanting to contact them to use the appropriate local number, or perhaps be politely informed that they're on holiday and would rather it waits till they're back. As a personal user, I love that I can send someone my contact details through Twitter in a very character efficient manner."

"By now, the Cheapflights.tel domain is a fantastic global hub for our ever growing international sites. It links to the top route pages and travel guides for each of our 8 local sites, and easily connects users with the appropriate Cheapflights Twitter page. It also provides airlines and travel agents with the local advertising rep's contact details."

"Looking into the future, I would like to see .tel domains become more social media savvy by allowing a user to specify a Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN etc. page by name (ed.: you can already add these as weblinks). I think the future of .tel domains lies in its continual adaptation to new technology, services, and interfaces � it must stay fresh to stay relevant."