Reglikedomain industry desk

.Hotels domain name for $2.2 million — Booking.com buys

Booking.yeah!

Hotel booking firm Booking.com has won exclusive rights to run the .hotels top level domain name for $2.2 million.

The firm was the only applicant for the .hotels domain name. Still, .hotels and .hoteis were one of two sets of domains to be considered “too similar” in ICANN’s first pass of string similarity. (Other domain names were trapped through individual string similarity objections.)

Therefore, there was a public auction today between Booking.com and Despegar Online SRL, applicant for .Hoteis.

The auction result means only .hotels will exist. .Hoteis, Portuguese for hotels, will be relegated to the trash bin.

.Hotel (singular) was a more popular extension with seven applicants. HOTEL Top-Level Domain s.a.r.l won a Community Priority Evaluation for that domain name.

Booking.com is perhaps best known in the domain name industry for promoting the non-existent domain name Booking.yeah.

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