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.
Elliot,
This is totatly off topic, but of interest I think to many. What is your opinion about emailing one of the major players about domains you may wish to sell to them or think they may be interested in?
1. its a no-no
2. its ok, but don’t be a pest
3. Go ahead, you may as well try.
Thanks
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t mind receiving an email with VERY GOOD domain names. I get annoyed when people spam me with crappy names. If you aren’t sure if a name is very good, it’s probably not good enough to send to a “major player.” 🙂
The worst anybody can do is not reply. What are you afraid of? Email away.
This can be an explanation for the 2 hotel domains parked from my experience, I saw many times domains lost on UDRP and the winner never changed the dns, so the domain remain on the parking page with the same dns even if the owner has changed, I know about domains lost on a udrp and after 5 years the domain has the same old dns, so even if the respondent lost the domain he still making money on the domain…… 🙂 crazy but true….
LOL, they probably have so many damn domains they forgot to update the DNS. I bought a domain last year and just recently got an email saying its going to expire. I spent $500 on the name and kind of forgot about it. It was pointing to someone elses SEDO account and they were getting paid for the clicks (if any). OOPS…
Its why I prefer doing a “transfer” to my own registrar then having someone push it into some registrar account I haven’t heard of. Lazy domainers…