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InterContinental Hotel Group Wants You To Google Earth Your Hotel Plans

The InterContinental Hotel Group might have failed at Facebook but when they got their hands on Google Earth, they did a lot better.

If you head to the IHG Google Earth page you can download their file and pop it into Google Earth and suddenly the globe is populated with IHG brand hotels.

Well, not entirely populated--you can easily see the concentration of hotels across North America and Western Europe--but you get the idea. Little green Hs pop up for Holiday Inns and the rest of their logos scatter in between them, until of course you zoom in and start seeing hotels at street level. It's all linked in to their booking system and is technologically pretty clever, we think.

But. (Always a but). Their idea is that you'll actually look for a hotel by Google Earth-ing your way around. We love seeing the logos pop up all over the place but we're not sure if we'd use this as a hotel research method. Maybe once we'd found a hotel in the right city we could check it out here to see what's nearby ... or maybe we're just not geeky enough. Yet.