Have you ever tried going to airtel.com domain name. If you have not…try it now – The name is forwarded to vodafone website. Yes, it may be a spanish Vodafone website, it still is the competitor’s website !
Nice domain-jacking I must say..
But can’t Airtel lay claim on the domain, I think not. if you see the snapshot above, the domain was registered way back in 1998, probably when airtel was not in existence.
Airtel must be loosing huge amount of traffic due to this domain forwarding. However, Vodafone has not taken undue advantage of owning this domain or they would have forwarded it to Vodafone Indian website – that sure would have been something :)
Now I am not sure how many of you already know about this, but I found our just very recently…
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I also checked this site long time back :) In fact, that is the problem of not tying .com but pressing CTRL+ENTER
In fact, I have met guys who take up good domain names and sell it off at twice or thrice its price.Airtel.in is some dutch company I had twitted about this 4 months back http://twitter.com/hjsblogger/statuses/843039903
But yes, .com makes a big difference.
-Himanshu Sheth
airtel.com was owned by Airtel Spain, Airtel spain was later acquired by Vodafone
Bharti Airtel’s website is airtel.in
Arun,
This has been posted many times by many bloggers in past… may be u just missed it.
What I know is, before Hutch buy, Vodafone was investor (around 10%) in Airtel. During that time, vodafone aquired the airtel.com domain name and forwarded it to vodafone. After Hutch buy vodafone was required by law to sell its stock in Airtel as an operator now it can not have stake in competitor. With that, it came to own a competitor’s domain. Seems it is not kind enough to transfer it to Airtel.
This is as per my belief… I am not 100% sure though.
Hey Vispy and Jolsna…surprising as it may sound, I did miss all the buzz around it that has been happening over this for quite some time now – so much for following the India Business Buzz :)
Vispy, thanks for the explaination – that throws some light on airtel.com domain name saga…
well initially i was surprised too but apparently airtel is a comapny in Spain which is owned by the same group which runs Vodafone in spain hence it redirects to their Spanish portal.
cheers!
The official website of Bharti’s Airtel is http://www.airtel.in
The airtel.com website is that of some singapore(or other foreign country) telecom provider who was acquired by Vodafone. Hence the redirect.
This is not domain jacking.
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