Geographic Domain Names

The Orlando Sentinel published an article this morning about the launch (well, re-launch) of Orlando.com. Expedia owns the website, and the registrant is listed as Hotels.com in the Whois database.

According to the article, “The site combines tips on a specific geographic location with the ability to book a hotel room, rather than one site for each hotel company, or an umbrella site like Expedia.” The article also notes that “it represents a movement toward travel destination marketing.”

It looks like Hotels.com has owned Orlando.com for quite some time. DomainTools Whois History tool shows that Hotels.com was listed as the domain name registrant since at least 2003. In addition, Screenshots.com shows that there have been previous iterations of the Orlando.com website. I am not entirely sure how this new website differs from the old versions, but you could check out Archive.org to see what changes were made.

One interesting thing I found was sort of by accident when

Deborah Kearns of RIS Media published an article about Peter Niederman and his Kentwood Real Estate brokerage. As you may recall, Kentwood Real Estate acquired Denver.com in 2012 for an undisclosed seven figure purchase price. The domain name was sold by Boulevards, a company that owns many large city .com domain names.

Judging by Peter’s comments in the RIS Media article, it seems that things are going well for Kentwood and Denver.com. In the article, Peter recalled that some people thought he was “crazy” for spending seven figures on the domain name, but the purchase has “paid off” for him and his company.

I reached out to Peter to ask about the article, and he let me know