By Keith Regan E-Commerce Times
06/04/02 9:57 AM PT
In another travel pact announcement, Priceline said it has forged a deal with
LastMinuteTravel to provide its trademark name-your-own-price services to that site.
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Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) has expanded and extended a
strategic alliance with Travelocity and
parent company
Sabre Holdings (NYSE: TSG) that will give
Travelocity exclusive billing on the portal giant's Web site.
Building on an existing relationship that dates back to 1997, the new deal also calls for
Yahoo! to provide "extensive marketing services" to Sabre. Sabre will use Yahoo's
Enterprise Solutions unit to provide videoconferencing services to its 25,000 travel
agents and 7,000 direct employees worldwide.
Delivering on Promise
Yahoo, which has partnered with Sony (NYSE: SNE)
and other companies in the past, has been promising
since last year to roll out additional corporate partnerships as it reduces its reliance
on advertising and tries to boost its enterprise and corporate services division.
In addition to a revamped Yahoo! Travel site, the deal calls for the portal to receive a
share of revenue generated when Travelocity books air travel, car rentals and hotel
reservations through Yahoo.
Yahoo! also will develop a marketing program that includes banner ads, premium search
listings and direct e-mail marketing, and the two companies will jointly develop new
travel products.
Busy Day
Forrester Research senior analyst Henry
Harteveldt told the E-Commerce Times that
partnerships between travel sites and other online retailers are a logical fit. He cited
Amazon's (Nasdaq: AMZN) deals with Hotwire and
Expedia (Nasdaq: EXPE) and
eBay's (Nasdaq: EBAY) link with
Priceline (Nasdaq: PCLN) as examples.
"It's a nice fit from both points of view," Harteveldt said. "The Web site is offering
another service to its users, and the travel site reaches millions more potential
customers."
In fact, the Yahoo! deal is just one of several partnerships recently announced in the
online travel space.
Priceline.com, which last month announced the addition of fixed-price travel deals to
its lineup, said it has forged a deal with LastMinuteTravel to provide its trademark
name-your-own-price services to that site.
Priceline said visitors to the LastMinuteTravel Web site and a co-branded
AOL site now
will be able to search fixed-price fares or bid for travel through the Priceline system.
Kissing Cousins
Meanwhile, Expedia and Ticketmaster
announced more cross-marketing of their offerings. Ticketmaster said its CitySearch unit
will develop a "Getaways Channel," where travel content will be combined with Expedia
travel bookings.
In turn, CitySearch content and Ticketmaster event listings will be added to the Expedia
site.
That deal, which involves two companies majority-owned by USA Interactive, came just a
day after USA announced its intention to buy all of both companies as well as a third
holding, Hotels.com.
Analysts have raised questions, however, about whether the 7.5 percent price premium USA
is offering will be enough to close those deals, which could be worth up to $4.5 billion.
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also calls for
Yahoo! to provide "extensive marketing services" to Sabre. Sabre will use Yahoo's
Enterprise Solutions unit to provide videoconferencing services to its 25,000 travel
agents and 7,000 direct employees worldwide.
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