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Bypass Google under fire from search engine giant
Monday, 07 Oct, 2010
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On Holiday Group’s Google Bypass project is to be renamed after legal threats from the internet giant.
The scheme was set up in the summer by Steve Endacott’s On Holiday Group and trades under the Holiday Nights brand.
The personal affiliate scheme sends Holiday Nights customers an invitation to look at its travel offers which each have their own URL.
Customers are then asked to send those URLs to friends and colleagues across their Facebook and Twitter accounts and if anyone subsequently books, the sender receives a £25 fee.
Endacott launched the scheme after telling users that he wanted to pay them money instead of Google which he claimed took about 75% of an agent’s commission through pay-per-click.
But now On Holiday Group says “the extensive coverage seems to have awoken the Silicon Valley giant’s legal department” and a name change is necessary.
Holiday Nights has been issued with an injunction for immediate cessation of the name Google Bypass.
Said Endacott: “I completely fail to see how a customers could believe we were pretending to be Google, when we are telling people to bypass Google.
“I can understand them wanting to protect their brand name, but fail to see why I can not tell customers how much of their hard earned holiday money has to be paid to Google."
Now Holiday Nights is launching a competition on its site to create a new name. In the meantime, the scheme will be called simply G-Bypass.
Holiday Nights reports that so far it has attracted 2400 people to post offers and generated 62 bookings.
Endacott added: “At the end of the day the success of the scheme has not been based on its name, but its ease of use. It does annoy me that Google can afford the legal expense to jump all over anybody who dares to challenge them, but I don’t fancy my chances of becoming the Goliath of the travel industry, so I suppose I’d better crawl back under the stone I came from.”
by Dinah Hatch
Dinah
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