New TravelCLICK, DoubleClick/Google Tools Enhance Advertising to Travel Agents Who Book $8 Billion in Hotel Revenue
TravelCLICK, a provider of ecommerce solutions for hotels, today announced a new technology to improve the quality of promotional advertising on select Global Distribution Systems (GDS), coupled with a new methodology for measuring advertising reach to a travel agent audience that yielded over $8 billion in hotel bookings in 2008. While the GDS has long been considered a cost-effective way to deliver targeted messages to travel agents at the point of sale, the tasks of ensuring best available rate (BAR) display in those ads and measuring advertising reach have been a challenge. Now advertisers have a new level of sophisticated functionality and transparency for GDS ad placement that is currently unrivaled elsewhere online.
Through a year-long collaboration using DoubleClick/Google ad serving technology, TravelCLICK and DoubleClick/Google have identified and leveraged unique predictive characteristics within both the ad serving and travel agent hotel shopping environments. The result of the research and corresponding development is two significant enhancements for advertising on the GDS.
Key enhancements
The first enhancement, Dynamic Rate Update, instantaneously inserts a hotel's BAR—specific to actual check-in date—into the ad copy displayed to the audience. By dynamically updating BAR data, it is much more likely that the advertised rate will be available when the audience responds to the advertisement, increasing the likelihood of a booking.
Second, a next-generation methodology isolates and identifies advertising-enabled travel agencies and measures the hotel booking revenue that they produce in participating GDS. While the actual advertising reach has not changed, this new methodology quantifies the hotel revenue an advertiser can attempt to influence within the channel. For full year 2008, the total hotel booking revenue delivered to the hotel industry by these advertising-enabled travel agencies exceeded $8 billion.
The American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA) has been instrumental in developing TravelCLICK's Dynamic Rate Update and advertising-enabled hotel booking methodology. In today's highly competitive marketplace, it is imperative that hoteliers provide best available rates to travel agents for bookings made on the GDS.
Through a year-long collaboration using DoubleClick/Google ad serving technology, TravelCLICK and DoubleClick/Google have identified and leveraged unique predictive characteristics within both the ad serving and travel agent hotel shopping environments. The result of the research and corresponding development is two significant enhancements for advertising on the GDS.
Key enhancements
The first enhancement, Dynamic Rate Update, instantaneously inserts a hotel's BAR—specific to actual check-in date—into the ad copy displayed to the audience. By dynamically updating BAR data, it is much more likely that the advertised rate will be available when the audience responds to the advertisement, increasing the likelihood of a booking.
Second, a next-generation methodology isolates and identifies advertising-enabled travel agencies and measures the hotel booking revenue that they produce in participating GDS. While the actual advertising reach has not changed, this new methodology quantifies the hotel revenue an advertiser can attempt to influence within the channel. For full year 2008, the total hotel booking revenue delivered to the hotel industry by these advertising-enabled travel agencies exceeded $8 billion.
The American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA) has been instrumental in developing TravelCLICK's Dynamic Rate Update and advertising-enabled hotel booking methodology. In today's highly competitive marketplace, it is imperative that hoteliers provide best available rates to travel agents for bookings made on the GDS.