I was doing a little research for a Holiday Inn ® and since I deal with domain names, instantly noticed the URL change in the address bar when I typed in HolidayInn.com . Using direct navigation and typing in HolidayInn.com will bring you to (if you notice the change in the address bar) http://www.ichotelsgroup.com/h/d/hi/1/en/home

This is called 301 redirection and also known as domain name forwarding.

Since many of us are well aware of the Holiday Inn brand, it might be confusing doing this kind of redirection IMO. I feel "safe" on HolidayInn.com but not so much on http://www.ichotelsgroup.com/h/d/hi/1/en/home because I never heard of ichotelsgroup.com before. Plus all the added h/d/hi/1 stuff doesn’t look all that professional. It made me scratch my head a little bit really.

Having to do a little extra research to see if I was at a site I really intended to be on, is not always a good thing for the site owner / company. After doing a little research, I found out that Holiday Inn is owned by InterContinental Hotels Group.

The company owns and uses all of it’s brand names like HolidayInnExpress.com, Intercontinental.com, HotelIndingo.com and more, including IHG.com but uses redirection and sends everything to the icHotelsGroup.com domain name and a specific page to fit what you first visited.

HolidayInn.com for example, displays the Holiday Inn logo in the left upper spot of the site, with www.holidayinn.com below the logo. This clearly makes it "look like" the Holiday Inn site and likely the domain name you intended to visit, but doesn’t answer the question for those who notice the URL change in the address bar and may question the change.

Even the Google.com SERP (search engine rank placement) says HolidayInn.com is the "Official Site" but once you click the listing, you are redirected to the longer ichotelsgroup.com domain and site.

With a strong brand name like Holiday Inn, I personally would not be using the redirection away from the brand name that many trust. Again, many people simply do not even notice the redirection, but many will and could result in losing customers.

One other little thing that I noticed that IHG does is with it’s Holiday Inn Express brand. I am not sure why, but they market with the domain name HiExpress.com . When I see the domain name, for some reason it makes me think of a Hawaii Airline or something like that. IHG does own HolidayInnExpress.com but I have to assume they are thinking "shorter is better" for this specific domain name and not using the exact match domain HolidayInnExpress.com which they also own. The Google SERP’s also use the HiExpress.com domain name. HolidayInnExpress.com does forward to the forwarded page for HiExpress.com . (confusing, I know).

The basic function and look are the same for all the forwarding brands websites to the one main domain name they use.

301 domain name redirecting has a ton of uses but I suggest if you do use 301 redirection, redirect people with a not so common domain name used for advertising like HiExpress.com and forward it to the more common brand name HolidayInnExpress.com . This way people are more familiar with the name (domain name & brand name) and hold that important trust factor!