Holiday Inn Hotels and Resorts relaunched
its Web site at www.holidayinn.com after settling litigation with an
unaffiliated Holiday Inn in Canada that had snapped up the domain
name before the larger company made its bid.
Holiday Inn will
continue to maintain for an indefinite period the www.holiday-inn.com URL that it had been using, but
eventually it will promote HolidayInn.com (with no hyphen) as its official
URL.
The defendant in
the dispute over the Web site, Holiday Inn by the Falls in Niagara
Falls, Ontario, also will affiliate with the Holiday Inn franchise
organization. Other details of the settlement are
confidential.
The Holiday Inn
Motel & Restaurant opened in Niagara Falls in the 1940s, before
the founding of Holiday Inn brand in 1952.
Owners of the
Canadian business then opened Holiday Inn by the Falls and closed
the original property; neither was affiliated with the worldwide
franchise group.
After the Niagara
Falls hotel beat the larger company to the HolidayInn.com domain
name, Holiday Inn in the U.S. tried unsuccessfully to obtain that
URL through negotiations, it said.
Then, lawyers for
the franchisor said, Holiday Inn by the Falls announced plans to
use www.holidayinn.com more like a travel agency, which
was not how the franchisor wanted its name used.
In 2001, owners of
the Holiday Inn registered trademark sued the Canadian operator in
U.S. District Court in Buffalo, N.Y., charging trademark
infringement.
To contact the
reporter who wrote this article, send e-mail to Nadine Godwin at [email protected].