So I’m a customer. I’m looking to book a hotel online in Thailand. Last time I stayed at “The Four Seasons” so I’d be happy to go back again to the same hotel. Very friendly staff, and a great breakfast if I remember correctly.

I type the hotel name into Google and hit search, and up comes the results page.

There it is, the hotel website – “Book online at the Four Seasons”, right at the top of the Google results page. So I click through to the link. Nice hotel website this, I recognise the photos of the nice rooms, the view. I had a pretty good stay there! Prices seem ok too, still reasonable. I wonder if it’s any cheaper on other sites though, like listings sites? Only takes a few seconds to check on other sites. Back to my results page for a quick scan of my options, maybe read a review or two.

Hang on, the second result on the results page looks like the hotel website too – “The Four Seasons”, similar web address too. So I click through on that link. Nice hotel website this, not the same as the last one though! But the same hotel? But this is the official website surely? But then what was the last one? I mean the photos are the same, even the prices are the same, or close enough. Two fairly legit looking but obviously different websites for the same place? What’s going on here?

I really don’t like the look of this at all. They can’t both be “official”. I wonder if one of those sites is spoofing and is up to no good? I wonder if the hotel knows about this? Surely they must check their own Google results from time to time!? They must have agreed to this. Cleverly done though, I’ll give them that, because I have no idea which is actually the official site. But why, I’m thinking, would a hotel have two different websites? Surely at best they’d just send a fraction of customers one way and a fraction the other, it can’t generate more customers! Unless of course one is being marketed well to attract a higher fraction of the existing customers at the expense of the other. But if you can do successful marketing with one site, you could equally have just applied your skills to the other and not bothered with the second site. I can’t see the business sense in this at all, for the hotel anyway.

But wait, this is getting even better – there are adverts there too on the results page, for both website addresses! Now that is hilarious because the hotel is just allowing someone else to bid on their name and drive up their own pay-per-click advertising costs in response. They’re bidding against themselves! An auctioneer’s dream. No wonder pay-per-click can make so much money for the search engines if people allow that to happen. Guess this hotel doesn’t know too much about online marketing. They really should be talking to experts about protecting their brand online for the long haul, because this marketplace is just getting more and more competitive all the time and customers are getting much more demanding.

We’re on Twitter, come and tweet with us….