GoTrump.com

» see gotrump.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 2006 booking a flight online from Turkey was not the same act it was from New York. I was twenty two, on TTNet at home, and the travel market I could actually reach was Turkish agency sites and airline pages. GoTrump was aimed at Americans with a card and a habit, and I would have had no use for it even if the name had meant anything to me then.

It launched on 24 january 2006, announced by Donald Trump at a press conference in Trump Tower. The tagline was "the art of the travel deal", after his book. He said he would find you the great travel deals whether you were after a luxury getaway or just the best rate on airlines and hotels worldwide, and he named the partners, of which Travelocity was the only one that mattered.

Travelocity was the engine. The search and the booking flow ran on licensed Travelocity technology, which was an ordinary white-label arrangement at the time and which plenty of other sites were also using. Sixty thousand hotels sat in the inventory. On top of that Trump added a section called "Trump's picks", marketed as the hotels and resorts he personally liked.

That is the entire product. A booking engine everyone else was also renting, with a name and a set of recommendations painted over it. Henry Harteveldt, a Forrester travel analyst who had previously been marketing director at Trump Shuttle, called it a vanity site in the Washington Post the week it opened and said it would not generate more than a few million in revenue a year. He was being generous.

It was gone in 2007. No month is recorded anywhere and there was no announcement. For a site that opened with a press conference in a marble lobby, that is the more interesting half of the obituary.

~ the dossier ~

~ the pitch at trump tower ~

Look at how much machinery went behind something so thin. Trump promoted the site on his daily radio program, Trumped!, and expected to work it into the sixth season of The Apprentice. The New York Times and the Washington Post both wrote it up inside two weeks, and the hospitality trade press ran the announcement release on the day.

None of that is a product. It is distribution for a product, and the product was a rented booking form. Every dollar of attention pointed at a page where the only differentiated asset was a list of hotels a rich man said he liked.

~ a white label with a name on it ~

The white-label travel business made sense for a lot of companies in 2006. If you already owned an audience with a reason to travel, an airline loyalty program or a magazine, then putting a booking engine behind your own brand captured a commission you were otherwise handing to somebody else. The audience came first and the booking was how you monetized it.

GoTrump inverted that. The brand was the whole thesis, and the assumption was that a name strong enough to sell steaks and a television show could move hotel rooms too. Travel does not work like that. People book on price and on inventory, and both of those belonged to Travelocity, which left the site competing against its own supplier while paying it.

~ the year it had ~

There is no traffic figure for GoTrump anywhere. No user count and no revenue number, not even a third-party estimate. That absence is the finding: a site that ran for roughly twelve months in the most heavily instrumented sector of the consumer web left behind nothing measurable at all.

The domain outlived the business by a long way. From march 2016 it redirected to the presidential campaign site. Somewhere between 2016 and 2022 the Lincoln Project bought it and pointed it at their own homepage, and as of 2026 it lands on a GoDaddy parking page. The booking engine was rented and the brand came off a book cover. The only durable asset turned out to be the address.

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