Expedia Affiliate Network (EAN) has today
announced a partnership with Travel Boutique Online (TBO), India’s
leading airline consolidator, to offer its customers access to Expedia’s
market leading hotel product.
The Expedia global hotel product numbers more than 100,000, including
an extensive choice of one to five star properties, individual guest
houses and bed and breakfasts. The size and scale of the organisation
enables EAN to offer the broadest spectrum of accommodation options at
the best prices, both in popular and emerging destinations.
TBO’s is used by over 4,000 travel agents across 130 cities in India.
The partnership with EAN enables these agent of offer customer’s access
EAN’s extensive hotel offering through one convenient, easy to use,
online platform. Jens Uwe Parkitny, Managing Director, EAN APAC,
comments, “The EAN solution has been tailored to ensure that it meets
the needs of the TBO customers. It is a comprehensive solution that will
deliver the potential to increase ancillary revenue for the agents that
access it.”
Sham Nijhawan, Chairman, Nijhawan Group, said, “The partnership with
EAN will help TBO provide a complete portfolio of hotel products across
all categories of hotels to its agent base, which still primarily only
sells air tickets. The partnership with EAN will enable agents to follow
the logical booking progression by offering customers the ability to
combine booking their hotel and flights. Hotel sales provide healthier
margins for agents than air tickets and as margins continue to shrink in
the travel trade, it will be very important for these agents to add new
products like hotels and packages.”
Globally, acceptance of online buying as a tool for hotels has been a
difficult transition from the standard offline system of calling the
supplier. Jens Uwe Parkitny, continues, “The concept of booking hotels'
online is still relatively new in India, but the solution offered by EAN
is flexible, easy to use and efficient. Agents can make real time
bookings for their customers and assess all the options before
committing to ensure they get the travel options to match their
individual customer’s needs.”
“The user interface on the TBO portal to buy hotels is the same as
most B2C websites”, says Gaurav Bhatnagar, Co-founder and CTO of TBO.
“The agent only needs to pick the dates, city and category of hotels
requested by the customer and they can see the multiple options
available in a matter of seconds. Product information including pricing,
location, features and cancellation policies are also freely available
on the interface. Payment can be made and confirmation is available in a
matter of minutes.”
TBO has 21 offices across India and services about 4,000 clients with a 24x7 call center. Agents can register on the website at
www.travelboutiqueonline.com, call 011 2652 0000 or write to
ceo@travelboutiqueonline.com for assistance.
Currently EAN works with more than 10,000 private label partners
across the globe including, Lonely Planet and Red Bull Air Race as well
as Asiana Airlines, Air China and Eva Air in APAC.
About Expedia Affiliate Network:
Expedia Affiliate Network (EAN), part of the Expedia Inc group,
partners with more than 10,000 private label partners globally, among
them many pre-eminent airlines, top train companies, portals and
market-leading online travel agencies including, Greenbee, Avis,
Tiscali, Eurostar, Lonely Planet, Moto GP, Sky, Ab-in-den-Urlaub.de,
Travelpartner.se, Holland.com, Weg.de, eDreams, Radisson, SAS, American
Airlines, JAL, Air China, Eva Air, The New York Times. LA Times,
Miami.com and Foxnews.com. EAN's distribution platform allows these
partners to offer their website users access to Expedia's highly
competitive travel products, including hotels, dynamic packages, car
hire, flights, insurance and destination services, and benefit from
unrivalled supply quality, and leading merchandising tools.