The Seven (sob) Daftest Names in Travel

I started some notes a while back for a blog post on The Ten Daftest Names in Travel, but that pesky Guillaume Thevenot has beaten me to it! Curses, Mutley!!!!!

So, here are the seven I had so far.

(And let's just get the disclaimer out of the way first. I'm not in any way suggesting these are bad companies or bad products. Far from it. I just don't think they've done themselves any favours in their choice of name.)

1) Boo.com - Snap! We (Guillaume & I) both agree on that one. Re-using the domain of world's most famous dot com crash. What can they have been thinking of???

2) @beyond - The tendy new brand name for CCAfrica. Did they actually think about how this will work in urls? Or how many people will get confused about whether it is a name or an internet address? How does the ampersand work in RSS feeds and any xml applications if it isn't described as an entity?

3) LV= This one isn't quite travel. It's is the name-that-looks-like-a-typo for the mutual insurance and investment group who back Nationwide Building Society's travel insurance.

4) Intercontinental The Barclay Hotel New York - Yea, that rolls off the tongue real easy! "Cabbie! Take me to the Intercontinental The Barclay Hotel!". It's certainly not unique. I see this kind of thing quite often, and particularly in the hotel industry with its endless takeovers and re-branding.

5) Malmaison and MaMaison - Two hotel groups born around the same time, one in the UK, the other in Poland, but unfortunately now both marketing themselves in the UK. One has to go! It probably should be Malmaison. Anything with "Mal" in front of it is "bad" - eg "Bad idea" airport (Malpensa) - so, the "BadHouse" hotel group?!

6) The One & Only - If it were applied to just one property it would sound ok, but it's a chain/collection of lots of 'unique' properties. It just irritates me every time I see it.

7) Easytobook.com. Hmmm. It's not the name (it's quite a good descriptive name). It's the logo. A combination of the "easy" name on an orange background, just feels too familiar to me. Ok, it's a Dutch company! Orange is a perfectly fair colour to choose, but put it this way -the first thing I did was check to see if Stelios was involved.

If you think of any more, give them to meeeeeee! Don't give them to him!

****************** Postscript: 18 Aug 09 *********************

A couple of additions to the list....

8) London Oxford Airport for all the reasons I raise in my post above. It's just plain daft!

9) Gap Adventures It was Nathan Midgley's post that alerted me to this. I have spent years not writing about these guys because gap year breaks is not a subject I cover. Every time a press release about them comes in, I delete it without reading it... along with the ones about cheap medications - another subject I don't write about. It turns out that they have nothing to do with gap year breaks. They call themselves GAP because (as if we should know) it stands for Great Adventure People. How ludicrous! Why not start up a bookshop and call it Fridges-r-Us?! GAP Adventures jump to pole position in my list of daft travel names.