.民宿
Is .民宿 a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody is chasing .民宿, as of 7 October 2026. One applicant claimed it and is out. We keep the entry on the record either way.
- Journey To The West
A Chinese word for homestay with a real industry behind it, but small stays live on booking apps, not their own websites.
chinese homestay and guesthouse operators, boutique-stay brands, and travel marketers targeting Chinese-language guests; secondarily platforms or agencies bundling web identities for small hospitality businesses
In Journey To The West's published portfolio of 323 strings submitted in the ICANN 2026 round; a Chinese-script IDN (“homestay”, A-label xn--octr39a). Their catalog line: “A local stay, with a personal touch.”
The 2012 applications making the most similar bet. Chosen by AI from every string in that round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Same bet almost exactly: a plain-language industry-category noun written in CJK script, sold as primary identity to thousands of small independent hospitality operators, and only legible to buyers who read that script — the target is the lodging version of the same script-locked vertical-generic play.
The pure accommodation-category generic — it wins only if lodging providers accept a vertical noun as their address instead of their own brand name, which is the identical premise behind a homestay/guesthouse category string.
Also an accommodation-type generic aimed at small, owner-operated short-stay properties rather than chains — the same buyer profile as 民宿 operators — but it is Latin-script and unscoped to any language market, so it lacks the target's linguistic moat and its dependence on one region's lodging culture.
What a .民宿 domain is
.民宿 is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Commerce. Nobody is chasing .民宿 today. The applicants that claimed it are out.
Is the .民宿 domain extension real yet?
.民宿 is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. Nobody has applied for it on the public record; the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round is the process that would decide whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .民宿 domain?
You can’t yet. A .民宿 name can only be registered once the string is delegated (added to the DNS root) and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .民宿 was .餐厅, delegated on 30 May 2015.
Is .民宿 a real TLD?
Not yet. .民宿 is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because an applicant claimed .民宿 and is no longer in it. We keep the entry, and every entry on this page links to its source.
- Journey To The West · now abandonedICANN
- Journey To The West · first recordedJourney To The West Corporation
“.民宿 (homestay) · Digital & Retail · “A local stay, with a personal touch.””Journey To The West Corporation
- The underlying vertical is genuine: minsu (homestay) is a recognized, sizable hospitality segment in China and Taiwan, so the string names a real market rather than a coinage. But the buyers are mostly micro-operators whose discovery and booking flows run through platforms and super-app ecosystems, leaving little need for a standalone web identity; by analogy, existing Chinese-script IDN gTLDs (e.g., generic business and commerce strings) have seen weak primary-identity use and thin aftermarkets even where the semantic fit was good — that analogy is the core of this judgment, as I have no registration figures for comparable strings. That places it in the 10-29 band: memorable and semantically apt, with plausible marketing or defensive registrations, but rarely a serious primary identity. It is not in the 30-49 band because there is no visible mechanism for volume registrations or a meaningful brand signal given how Chinese-language users navigate the web, and not in the 1-9 band because the term is a real, growing industry label with some niche and campaign-use demand plausible over 5 years. Main market uncertainty: whether small Chinese hospitality operators develop any sustained appetite for independent web identities outside platform ecosystems within 5 years.