In a bid to show its salt as being a brand that it serves up more than just hotels, Hotels.com has quite literally gone to great lengths. The company currently owns the longest URL in internet history with an address that sits at a gigantic character count of 2,083.
The concept derived from the theory that consumers are easily aware of Hotels.com being a hotel booking platform - as it says in the name - but are far less likely to know that the site can also be used to booking seaside cabanas, yurts, and interesting alternative hotels like a dolphin hotel in San Diego. This discrepancy is unsurprisingly due to the simplistic nature of the company's name and web address. The solution? Fix the name.
Hotels.com has now acquired the longest web address published, and it was created by CP+B advertising agency.
Quinn Katherman, the agency's creative director, commented on the ad campaign and the inspiration behind it:
“Our campaign message is that Hotels.com lets you do you basically everywhere,” Katherman says. “But that wasn’t very obvious based on our name. To let people know Hotels.com has more than just hotels, the most obvious thing for us to do was to change our name to include every type of accommodation available. URLs are such an overlooked part of our internet experience now. So the best way to get people to notice a URL again was to have the longest one ever published.”
Hotels.com was founded by David Litman in 1991 in Dallas, Texas in the U.S., and lists over 325,000 hotels in approximately 19,000 locations, including North, Central and South America, Europe, Australia, Japan, China and the Pacific Rim, the Middle East and South Africa.
The full and humorous URL can be found here, and redirects to Hotels.com.
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