18(a) Describe the mission/purpose of your proposed gTLD

Prototypical answer:

Booking.com BV, a subsidiary of Priceline.com (Nasdaq:PCLN), is the No.1 online hotel reservations agency in the world, in terms of the number of online hotel room nights sold. Booking.com is dedicated to offering the best rates for all of the accommodation offered, attracting over 30 million unique visitors each month via the Internet from both leisure and business markets worldwide.

Established in 1996, Booking.com BV offers competitive rates for any type of property, ranging from small independent hotels to a five star luxury. The Booking.com website is available in 41 languages and offers more than 168,000 affiliated hotels in 160 countries around the world.

Booking.com B.V. is based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and is supported internationally by offices in: Amsterdam - Athens - Auckland - Bangkok - Barcelona - Berlin - Brussels - Buenos Aires - Cambridge - Cape Town - Casablanca - Chicago - Copenhagen - Dubai - Dublin - Edinburgh - Grand Rapids - Hong Kong - Honolulu - Houston - Innsbruck - Istanbul - Kuala Lumpur - Las Palmas de Gran Canaria - Las Vegas - Lille - Lisbon - London - Loulé (PT) - Lyon - Madrid - Málaga - Mexico City - Miami - Milano - Montréal - Moscow - Munich - New York - Nice - Norwalk - Orlando - Oslo - Paris - Prague - Riga - Rome - San Francisco - São Paulo - Shanghai - Singapore - Stockholm - Sydney - Tokyo - Vancouver - Venice - Vienna - Warsaw - Zagreb - Zürich.

Through its website, www.booking.com, Booking.com has built over the years an impressive brand, with a global exposure and a truly international clientele.

According to the Applicant, the purpose of the .hotels TLD may be manifold. A few of the main purposes currently intended are:

i. Pioneer the highly recognizable .hotels gTLD in order to further support its day-to-day activities, for the benefit of the Applicant, its affiliates, including hotels and hotel chains for which Booking.com provides hotel reservation services;

ii. Provide stakeholders of the Applicant, including subsidiaries, hotel partners, affiliate partners, users, and their respective directors, officers, employees, with a recognizable and trusted identifier on the Internet, creating additional level playing fields for the hotel industry under the authority of a prominent player in the hotel reservation marketplace. Such stakeholders may include, but are not limited to:

* its subsidiaries in various countries;
* business affiliates and partners, including individual hotels and hotel chains;
* prospective and current customers; and
* directors, officers and employees of the Applicant, its subsidiaries, hotel partners or business affiliates.

iii. Provide such stakeholders with a secure and safe Internet environment that is mainly or even fully under the control of the Applicant and its subcontractors;

iv. Providing customers of Booking.com and holders of domain name registrations in the .hotels gTLD with a service that aims at putting users first;

v. Offering multilingual hotel reservation services that are directly or indirectly accessible under specific domain names registered in the .hotels gTLD, referring to, amongst others, names of hotels, geographic locations in which affiliate hotels can be found, hotel categories, etc.

This just gives an idea of how Booking.com could use .hotels in the future. In the beginning, and until further developing a detailed plan to use this new gTLD, Booking.com’s intention is to implement a single registrant TLD.

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