Travelport GDS Enhances Advertising Opportunities on Worldspan

Travelport GDS has expanded its Featured Property tool to the Worldspan travel booking platform.

Featured Property is a powerful point-of-sale tool that provides the visual advantage of positioning hotel properties at the top of a travel agent’s search screen.

This advertising option, previously only available on Travelport’s Galileo booking system, provides hotels and resorts with the opportunity to improve placement in search results and promote their property during the critical booking process as travel agents look to find hotels in specific locations on the Worldspan and Galileo global distribution systems (GDS).

Featured Property priority placement provides hoteliers with the ability to place information about their hotels in the perfect spot when travel agents are looking to book within a specific region. From a travel agent perspective, this equates to placing items at the coveted eye level position on supermarket store shelves. Realising the value of a new opportunity to increase sales, more than 1,000 properties have already enrolled during the Worldspan pre-selling phase.

Travelport GDS has 63,000 travel agency locations globally booking 20 million hotel room nights annually on its travel booking platforms. In total, Travelport offers travel agents some 84,500 hotel properties from 265 hotel chains and more than 430 hotel brands.

In the Asia Pacific region last year, some 15,000 travel agencies used Travelport GDS to book more than 2 million room nights, making Travelport one of the largest facilitators of hotel bookings in the region.

“During these challenging times, it is more important than ever to utilise all means possible to improve placement in search results, increase bookings and generate incremental revenue,” said George Harb, commercial director for Asia at Travelport GDS. “We’ve seen the appeal of spending advertising dollars on a vehicle like Featured Property™ jump because it’s targeted at travel agents’ ‘eyeballs’ – the ones actually booking room nights for those who are travelling.”

Hotel clients that have taken advantage of Galileo’s Featured Property in Asia include Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts, The Taj Hotels & Palaces, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts, Regal Hotels International, Langham Hotels International, Marriott International Inc, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Hilton Hotels and Hyatt Hotels & Resorts.

“We’ve seen a 25% increase in sales globally on Featured Property, year on year for the month of March 2009. Featured Property is available in the Asia Pacific region from as little as US$12-21 per day depending on the country,” Harb added.

“Airlines, car rental firms, tourist attractions, casinos, credit cards and even governments that need to inform the travel agents community about travel advisories or travel warnings, can take advantage of sign-in messaging that welcomes travel agents as they log onto their GDS each day starting from US$790 per region or US$2,590 for a system-wide global sign-in message. This B2B space is one of the most cost effective and targeted solutions available where advertisers are able to reach the travel agent environment for just 0.04 - 0.07 US cents,” Harb said.

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