Skift Take
What's in a brand? When it comes to those like Hotels.com, probably hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. The inconvenient truth is that vacation-rental-selling Hotels.com isn't likely to rebrand anytime soon.
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Online Travel This Week
Rebranding got a lot of attention in the past few days with Facebook's name-change to Meta, but what about Hotels.com's outdated brand?
The idea for this column arrived Wednesday afternoon when the subject line of a Hotels.com email popped in: "We offer so much more than hotels."
And then there was the headline in the email body: "Don't let the name fool you, we do more than just hotels."
You know where this is heading. Hotels.com, which was among the first websites before the turn of the century to enable online hotel bookings, today also offers vacation rentals, apartments, villas, houseboats, trailer parks, and apartment hotels — not to mention things to do, car rentals, packages and flights.
Like Expedia.com, Hotels.com has been busy adding vacation rentals to it