Hotelicopter creates hotel affiliate network, switches business model

Hotel metasearch site Hotelicopter is launching a new system aimed at tourist boards and online publishers so they can feature and search hotel availability.

The Hotelicopter Network works in a similar way to other affiliate services by circulating hotel information, room rates and other availability around other third party sites through a white label system.

The initial target publishers are tourist boards, DMOs and other travel content sites that need access to hotel stock but do not have the resources (or inclination) to deal directly with individual hotels or chains.

At the centre of the project is the white label which is bolted to the existing web service and allows users to browse hotel availability, searching by price range, star rating, amenities, property type and brand.

Room prices are listed from online travel agencies, hotel aggregators and he hotel itself. Publishers can also de-select a feed from each hotel.

One of the first clients to be officially unveiled is VisitCharlottesville in Virginia, US.

And a map view:

Hotelicopter CEO Adam Healey says around 50 publishers are expecting to integrate the hotel network over the coming months, mostly US tourism boards and DMOs.

Hotelicopter and publishers share commission revenue from each booking made, Healey confirms.

There are around 1,500 organisations in the US that Hotelicopter is targeting, around 60% of which have no or limited hotel search capability.

Travelocity currently has a reasonably strong presence in this sector but only features properties on its own platform, rather taking multiple feeds from a number of OTAs and suppliers.

Healey admits creating the Hotelicopter Network is a long way from the launch model of the company in April 2009 (remembered by many for its April Fool video clip).

The B2B part of the business has become a major focus for the company, although the consumer-facing Hotelicopter will remain, Healey says.

“We will not be investing much in marketing or development of the main site any more, using it mostly as a showcase to potential partners for our network business.”

Adam Healey says:

July 30, 2010 at 11:07 am

Kevin,

Thanks for the great write up!

Three small things to add:

1. The launch of the hotelicopter network is really an extension of our business, not a “switch,” as we discovered a significant demand from other web sites that wanted to leverage our hotel search user experience and the content and relationships that we’ve formed with both online travel agencies and hotel chains. In the interest of increasing distribution for our advertising partners, we can now help them connect with hotel bookers all over the web, instead of simply on hotelicopter.com.

2. We are currently targeting three main publisher categories: travel web sites, destination marketing organizations, and corporate booking engines. We’ll be announcing new publishers added to our network as they go online. DMOs are a very exciting category for us, there is incredible opportunity here (1,500 DMOs in the US alone, collectively driving over 20 million uniques a month). There are also fantastic opportunities within additional publisher categories to provide a best-of-breed hotel search solution.

3. We actually are going live this week with 3 different solutions for publishers. The first is the private label hotel search engine, which you can see above. We’ve also launched an API that enables any approved web publisher to build their own application around our hotel content and monetization path, or simply access rates & availability and deep links from our advertising partners. The third solution are customizable widgets, which may be more applicable for web publishers that want to preserve their existing web interface and supplement it with both static and dynamic hotel content, and begin monetizing hotel bookings on their web site.

Thanks again Kevin!

Cheers,

Adam
hotelicopter CEO