Tenant Dispute Over HomeAwayfromHome.com
Vacation rental firm files domain arbitration cases.
HomeAway.com in Domain Dispute
When I go on vacation with my family, I usually try to rent a vacation home. Not only is it affordable for a family, but it lets you live with the locals. To find vacation homes I usually turn to HomeAway, Inc., an Austin-based firm that has raised over $400 million of capital to do a roll up of vacation rental web sites.
So I was disappointed this stretch to see that the firm filed a domain arbitration case for the generic domain name HomeAwayFromHome.com. HomeAway has a number of registered trademarks for “Home Away from Home”. Two of them were filed recently with first used in commerce dates of 2008. Still, the firm also purchased or licensed a trademark that was registered in 1999. But HomeAway, Inc. wasn’t founded until 2005.
A HomeAway representative stated the firm filed the complaint following trying to contact the owner of HomeAwayfromHome.com numerous times without success.
HomeAwayFromHome.com is registered to Frank Schilling’s Name Administration, which receives perhaps hundreds or thousands of unsolicited queries every month.
On the same day HomeAway filed the dispute for HomeAwayFromHome.com, it also filed one for VRBOcleaner.com. HomeAway owns VRBO.com (Vacation Rental By Owner). The registered owner of the domain runs a modest home cleaning business that does a work for vacation home owners that list their homes on VRBO.com. She stated that Home Away contacted her regarding the domain, and she decided to give it up. She thought she was supposed to cancel the domain with the registrar, but of course that means it can’t be transferred to Home Away. Therefore, Home Away filed the UDRP.
Although that case will simply require a rubber stamp from NAF, I wouldn’t be surprised if a panel found HomeAway guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking for HomeAwayfromHome.com. That might be better than the alternative for HomeAway; if it somehow convinces an arbitration panel that it ought to hand over this generic domain, it will surely end up in a court fight.
In that case, it might need to use its service to find a nice vacation rental in Cayman Islands.
