Wiki Travel:Trademarks

Firms and individuals often use the ® (registered trademark) or ™ (trademark) or ℠ (service mark) symbols when referring to their own products, names, or services. This notifies the public that the word or image used is a trademark.

However, no one else is required to use the ™ or other symbols. Since typically only trademark owners use these symbols, they usually end up on promotional literature, ads, boxes, etc. Using these symbols on Wiki Travel makes it look like promotional literature, or that we're pandering to the trademark holders. They also clutter up our guides with extra "noise" characters that don't serve any purpose. For these reasons, avoid using the ™, ®, or ℠ symbols.

Promotional literature also often has trademark notices at the end: Foo and the Foo logo are trademarks of The Foo Company. Again, we are under no obligation to make these statements, so we can safely avoid trademark disclaimers.

Where one company has a monopoly or near-monopoly, in rare instances we redirect the trademarked name to the generic article; for instance, Amtrak → Rail travel in the United States.

Some trademarks are used as generic nouns in daily speech. When describing a generic product (at least when competitors are available), a non-proprietary noun should be preferred; see Wiki Travel:Words to avoid.

A brief list of such trademarks frequently used by travellers:

See Wikipedia's list of those. See also English language varieties as many are distinctly regional in use.