IndiGo Airlines, India's biggest low-cost carrier (LCC) by market share, has landed in a legal battle with one of the country's other significant LCCs, GoAir.
According to Economic Times (ET), GoAir is losing online customers to IndiGo because of the similarity in their website names: goair.in and goindigo.in.
A GoAir spokesperson spoke with Tnooz about this development:
"Since the matter is sub judice, we will not be able comment on it. All I can say is - we are protecting our trademark and preventing any infringement."
IndiGo didn't respond to our questions. We will update this, once we hear from it.
According to a person who anonymously spoke to ET:
"This is hurting GoAir's business interest as the website contains 'Go' as one of the keywords that they have bought from search engine Google and that's affecting the company adversely. Wadia Group owned airline's (GoAir) customers are getting diverted towards Indigo."
As on September 2013, IndiGo has a market share of more than 30%, whereas GoAir has a market share of about 7.5%.
The domain goair.in was created on February 16, 2005. And, goindigo.in was created on June 10, 2005.
It's interesting to see this development, because both domain names were created in the same year and the issue over domain names is rising after eight years of operation.
We searched in Google for India-based low cost carrier names, and noticed an IndiGo Google Ad displayed for all except "JetKonnect". *UPDATE: The ads were for "goibibo", not "goindigo".
Below screengrab shows the IndiGo ad when searched for "goair" keyword in Google.
Recently, Pinterestsued the trip planning service Pintrips over the usage of word "Pin".
NB:Legal image via Shutterstock.