Hotel Engine Rebrands as Engine with Engine.com

In June, with the help of DomainTools, I noticed that the Engine.com domain name was pending transfer and the nameservers had recently changed to Cloudflare. This valuable domain name transferred to Cloudflare, where it is currently registered under Whois privacy.

We now know who acquired Engine.com.

According to an article in Fortune today, Hotel Engine is rebranding itself as Engine. The Engine.com domain name now forwards to HotelEngine.com. I suspect that will reverse when the company fully rebrands in October.

The reason for the rebrand seems pretty simple – Hotel Engine as a brand was too limiting. People only expected to book hotel rooms on Hotel Engine. Rebranding as Engine while acquiring the generic Engine.com domain name allows the company to offer additional travel services without confusion. This is outlined in a FAQ on the splash page visitors to Engine.com land on:

When we started this journey, we focused on revolutionizing hotel bookings for businesses. But our customers asked for more, and we listened. Our evolution into Engine marks our expansion into full-service business travel solutions for our customers. With the addition of flights and cars, our customers can manage all their business travel on a single platform.

Prior to the transfer to Cloudflare, Engine.com had been registered under Whois privacy at GoDaddy. Prior to that, the domain name was owned by a domain investor I have known for many years. I will reach out to him to see if he was the seller, and if so, if he can comment on the sale price.

Right now, I have no idea what the company paid to acquire the Engine.com domain name. I would not be surprised if it was well into the 7 figures (or more). I think it is similar in nature to the recent sale of Rocket.com.

Perhaps the sale price will be announced one day. Until then, kudos to the team behind this great rebrand. The company is now reportedly valued at $2.1 billion.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

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