
The Booking and Despegar online agencies have submitted applications to the global Internet authority (ICANN) to obtain the exclusive management of the new .hotel, .hotels, .hoteis, and .hoteles URL extensions, pushing hôteliers to counter-attack.
The hotel unions therefore fear that the monopoly of operating these new names is in the hands of online agencies and not hotel operators, leading to increasing traffic diversion from official hotel sites and weakening establishment visibility on the Internet.
FHE and Hotrec defend another alternative: a "communal" application to manage these new extensions, which would reserve this domain name attribution for hotels, hotel chains, and hotel associations.
Alerted by FHE, Christine De Veyrac, European MP, member of the Transport and Tourism Commission in the European Parliament, stated: "{The creation of new domain names was to improve the visibility and the clear identification of a brand, an economic actor, a hotel for example. By assuming the exclusive use of domain names as generic as ".hotel", ONLINE travel agents hijack what rightfully belonged to the hospitality industry