I think from a branding perspective .travel is horrible! Because, like you, a good majority of people don't even know that .travel is a tld to begin with. Heck, even internet marketing guys like us don't even know about it.
That turns verbally telling someone else the domain name even more difficult.
"Hey Joe, Have you heard about airplanes.travel. Its the best place to buy airplane tickets"
"Oh airplanetravel.com? I'll have to check it out"
"No, airplane.travel"
.........
So on and so forth, spending the next few minutes talking about how you can actually go to a .travel instead of a .com and not really talking about your business.
Just my 0.02