I work for a an independent hotel in England. We have mostly UK residents as guests, though we are in one of the bigger cities and we do get visitors from further afield.
Our usual website address is of the form www.our-hotel.co.uk and this has served us well.
I received an email the other day from someone at www.dn-net.org which seems to be a web address registrar in China. At first I thought this could be scammy, but now I’m thinking not. They said that they’d had an application to register the following addresses-
our-hotel.asia
our-hotel.net
our-hotel.org
our-hotel.info
our-hotel.us
our-hotel.in
our-hotel.cn
our-hotel.com.cn
our-hotel.tw
our-hotel.hk
our-hotel.com.hk
…but that as they’re similar to ours they’re concerned that “your name might be affected negatively by their application” and we have the option to register first.
There’s obviously going to be a cost involved here if we do. So the question is - is it worth it? What’s the likelihood that we would be negatively affected? Has not doing this ever been detrimental to a business?
(Mod note - not sure if there’s a factual answer possible to this, if this is the wrong forum please move somewhere more appropriate)