A while back, I wrote about Intercontinental Hotel Group’s massive UDRP filing for 1,529 domain names that they believe infringed on some of their hotel brands. They ended up winning a large majority of the domain names in this filing, and the few domain names that I checked smartly forward to the proper IHG website (see staybridge-suites-reno.com and hotel-indigo-london-paddington.com as examples).

I was doing some domain intelligence today, and I came across something that was very surprising to me. Intercontinental Hotels Group owns at least a couple of fantastic generic domain names such as NashvilleHotels.com and SanAntonioHotels.com, yet they aren’t forwarding them to any of their own websites. Instead, they are parking them.

Sure, they are making money when a visitor clicks on one of their competitor’s links, but they are losing potential customers. According to the IHG website, there are 32 hotels within 30 miles from San Antonio and 18 hotels within 30 miles from Nashville. With all of these hotels, you’d think they would at least try to drive dollars instead of earning pennies (and even paying for their own traffic since Holiday Inn is a PPC advertiser and a IHG hotel).

I don’t understand why the company would park these names instead of forwarding them to the IHG main reservation website. It doesn’t seem to make sense that they would meticulously forward the UDRP-won names to the proper place, yet they haven’t done anything with these two great generic domain names.

PS, if someone from IHG reads this, I would love to buy these domain names. You know how to contact me.

According to the World Intellectual Property Organization website’s list of pending UDRP filings, Inter-Continental Hotels Corporation / Six Continents Hotels, Inc. filed a UDRP for 1,529 domain names that they believe infringe on some of their hotel brands. Names such as candlewood-braintree.com, holiday-inn-dfw-north.com, los-angeles-commerce-casino.com, and staybridge-bwi-airport.com were registered by what appears to be one party, Unister GmbH (although I only searched a random assortment of these domain names).

It appears that many of these domain name I searched were registered recently – in mid to late 2009. For example, staybridge-suites-reno.com was registered July 21, 2009, hotel-indigo-london-paddington.com was registered May 23, 2009, and holiday-memphis-hacks.com was registered July 21, 2009.

To possibly make a defense even more difficult for the domain registrant, it appears that some of the names I searched are listed for sale at Sedo (holiday-inn-universal-studios.com for example), and I would think the Complainant could allege this to be a sign of bad faith.

The names I searched all appear to have a hotel booking engine on them, and when dates of stay are entered into the appropriate fields, visitors are redirected to HotelReservation.com, which appears to be owned by the entity that owns the other domain names I searched.

I can never predict what a UDRP panel is going to decide, but if the panel awards all of the domain names to the Complainant, that could mean a loss of upwards of $11,000 assuming a registration cost of $7.25. Ouch.