According to the World Intellectual Property Organization website’s list of pending UDRP filings, Inter-Continental Hotels Corporation / Six Continents Hotels, Inc. filed a UDRP for 1,529 domain names that they believe infringe on some of their hotel brands. Names such as candlewood-braintree.com, holiday-inn-dfw-north.com, los-angeles-commerce-casino.com, and staybridge-bwi-airport.com were registered by what appears to be one party, Unister GmbH (although I only searched a random assortment of these domain names).
It appears that many of these domain name I searched were registered recently – in mid to late 2009. For example, staybridge-suites-reno.com was registered July 21, 2009, hotel-indigo-london-paddington.com was registered May 23, 2009, and holiday-memphis-hacks.com was registered July 21, 2009.
To possibly make a defense even more difficult for the domain registrant, it appears that some of the names I searched are listed for sale at Sedo (holiday-inn-universal-studios.com for example), and I would think the Complainant could allege this to be a sign of bad faith.
The names I searched all appear to have a hotel booking engine on them, and when dates of stay are entered into the appropriate fields, visitors are redirected to HotelReservation.com, which appears to be owned by the entity that owns the other domain names I searched.
I can never predict what a UDRP panel is going to decide, but if the panel awards all of the domain names to the Complainant, that could mean a loss of upwards of $11,000 assuming a registration cost of $7.25. Ouch.