Yes, best to avoid them. Not sure what you mean by being “led to their website”?
Obviously the company chose their name carefully to make people think it’s the guest reservations department of a hotel they just Google searched. They wouldn’t call themselves “be careful we are not the hotel .com”. They want people to make false assumptions and not do more than briefly glance at the website address. It’s great that you stopped for a minute and looked more closely and recognised they are in fact a booking site.
On these forums we often have people say “I was on the hotels own website and I was hacked and redirected to this awful company. I thought I was booking direct then after paying got an email from ……company and there were extra fees I didn’t know about”. Of course they were not on the hotels official website and were not hacked.
The common factor in many of the stories from the forums is getting onto these sites after googling a hotel and just clicking one of the first search results, or having something pop-up. I suggest finding the official IHG brand website (which includes the hotel chains like Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express etc) and bookmarking it in your computer so you will be taken directly to it in future, or maybe download their official APP.
It’s hard making bookings sometimes and we all need to be so careful and slow down.