Travel sellers expressed disappointment, anger and frustration last week, following a decision by Carnival Corp.'s North American brands to prohibit third parties, including travel agencies, from bidding on the brands' trademarks as keywords in online search engines.

Carnival Cruise Lines, Princess Cruises, Holland America Line, Cunard Line and Seabourn Cruises all said the prohibition would take effect on Jan. 1.

The lines' parent company, Carnival Corp., insisted that the new policy was not a corporate initiative but a brand-specific decision. However, the Carnival brands are adopting very similar policies.

When asked why they were imposing the prohibition, the lines said they were attempting to eliminate confusion when consumers search for their brands online.

"When a consumer searches for Carnival, they're seeking Carnival content," said Carnival Cruise Lines spokeswoman Jennifer de la Cruz. "The goal is to provide the cleanest, straightest path to the most comprehensive Carnival content available, which is on Carnival.com. This approach of restricting third parties from bidding on a company's branded keywords is becoming commonplace throughout the retail sector."

In the travel sector, American Airlines notably sued Google in April 2007 for allowing other companies to buy American's trademarks as search terms. That suit was settled the following year, but the terms were never disclosed. American also sued Yahoo over its auctioning of American's trademarks in the European market. Other travel brands have sporadically either mounted prohibitions of trademark keywords in their distribution channels or have taken action to prevent search engines from selling their trademark keywords to third parties.

Among those actions that have resulted in lawsuits, the case law is mixed but as of now appears to be trending in favor of trademark holders.

Princess spokeswoman Julie Benson said, "We believe most consumers will see this as positive and will be able to easily find the information they're looking for. They can then take all the info they've researched and bring it to an agency for booking."

What jarred many agents was that irrespective of the brands' stated motives, the prohibition would result in directing more traffic to the lines' own websites rather than to travel agency sites.

"This will very negatively impact us and every agency that advertises online," said a director at a major online cruise retailer who asked not to be identified. "This policy hurts agencies and helps cruise lines, particularly by driving even more direct business."

The lines were adamant that this was not an attempt to direct business away from travel agents.

"We are not changing our distribution strategy," Benson said. "Our entire marketing approach is to push clients to travel agents. Every single marketing piece that we produce tells consumers to see their travel professional. This is absolutely not changing."

When asked to elaborate on the kinds of search engine issues that had triggered the prohibition, the brands were vague, but Princess and HAL both said they anticipated that the move would drive down the costs of the keywords by removing a lot of competing bidders.

Within certain parameters, the three biggest search engines -- Bing, Google and Yahoo -- all sell to the highest bidder preferred placement at the top of their result pages. This has enabled travel agencies to bid on the brand names of cruise lines and other products so that when anyone searches for "Cunard" or "Princess cruises," for example, a link to the agency's website will show up among the top links listed on the results page.

"We don't want to compete with travel agents to buy our own name," Benson said. "We have found ourselves bidding against agencies for our own keywords. ... We do expect that the cost for these keywords will probably decrease as a result" of the prohibition.

P.J. Cammarata, a managing partner with Internet marketing company ThinkBigSites.com, said that at current rates, Carnival Cruise Lines is paying Google just under $3 for every click that a person makes on its sponsored link for the phrase "carnival cruises." Carnival and the agencies that come up as a sponsored site pay that fee whether someone ends up booking a cruise or clicks off after a few seconds.

At present, the competition for those sponsored link spots could, depending on the geographic area of the searcher, include bids by Cruise.com, America's Vacation Center or Vacations to Go, among other retailers. By preventing those agencies from bidding on Carnival Corp.'s brands, the new prohibition could decrease the brands' costs by as much as 50%, Cammarata estimated.

Carnival, he said, "is literally bidding against all those folks, and it costs them more to advertise their own product or brand on Google. They are basically taking out a large percentage of their competition in one fell swoop."

Beyond that, Cammarata said, the Carnival brands could be concerned that eventually one of the agencies could rank above them on search engines.

"If a company that sells cruises has very deep pockets and really understands how to operate a pay-per-click campaign, there is a good possibility that they could be ranked above Carnival itself," he said. "And Carnival, of course, doesn't want that. And most other companies wouldn't want that."

The new policy can only apply to sponsored links, since "organic" search results on search engines cannot be increased by buying keywords.

Organic search results are links that appear on search engine results pages strictly because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to appearing as a result of pay-per-click advertising.

Cammarata, whose business is built on helping websites improve organic results on search engines, said that while sponsored results produce business, they are not clicked on nearly as often as organic results are.

He cited a Penn State University study indicating that 84% of searchers gravitate toward organic listings rather than sponsored links.

Cammarata said that because the sponsored links are advertisements, people generally don't trust them as much.

To counter the impact of the Carnival lines' new prohibition, Cammarata said agencies would have two options: They can choose to bid for generic cruise phrases, such as "vacation cruise," or they can work to enhance organic search results by peppering their websites with mentions of Carnival Corp.'s brand names and phrases.

"Although these agents will initially be hurt by Carnival's new pay-per-click rules, the upside potential is that a high organic ranking will generate three to five times as much Web traffic to their sites as did their sponsored link ad," Cammarata said.

Several agencies in the pay-per-click game noted that the cost for generic cruise terms would rise as a result of the prohibition as agencies pour more marketing dollars into generic phrases.

"The dollars that used to be spent on bidding the cruise line-branded terms will be spent in other areas, which could drive up costs for everyone," said Steven Hattem, vice president of marketing for CruiseOne and Cruises Inc. Hattem said that since his brands do not focus much on bidding branded keywords, "it will become more expensive to drive consumers to an agency website due to the price increases" for generic terms.

Anthony Hamawy, president of Cruise.com, a major online travel agency, said his company would try to make up for traffic lost to the prohibition by using more generic cruise terms.

"It will definitely take away some traffic that we'd normally get, but there are a lot of ways to generate traffic to your website," Hamawy said. "More of a concern is that we're a distributor on behalf of the cruise line. We have a contract to do business on their behalf. If you were a Ford dealer or a Honda dealer, imagine if those manufacturers said, 'You can't use our name.' "

Hamawy said he understood the cruise lines' desire to decrease the cost of keywords, but he found the timing inopportune.

"We are coming out of a tough year, and lots of agencies just made it," he said. "We are the lines' partners. We are in it together. I understand the rationale, but I'm not thrilled by the timing. Everybody has been working a lot harder for a lot less, and 2010 isn't exactly guaranteed to be a good year."

Some travel sellers said they were speaking to lawyers about the possibility of challenging the policy. But online advertising experts noted that Carnival Corp. brands own their trademarks, and thus courts are likely to uphold the prohibition.

Cammarata said any cruise line could follow suit: "If it works for Carnival, it can work for Royal Caribbean," as it could for "any business anywhere that has people reselling their products."

Hamawy said that based on conversations he's had with other lines, he did not think they were looking to copy the Carnival Corp. brands' prohibition, though he admitted, "You never know. They will probably see how it plays out and see if it's good or bad."