Conference Presenters

The following experts from the Online Industry will be presenting at the Online Presence conferences:

Wotif
Booking.com
Orbitz
Travelclick
Quickbeds
Trip Advisor
Levart
Tourism WA
Scoopon
Travel Zoo
Carly Odgers - The Publican Group Australia
David Tham - Social Media
Linda Daamen - SEO
Kohen Grogan - Reputation Management

WOTIF

Wotif.com sells more rooms than any other travel website in Australasia.

Our website is the first choice for business and leisure travellers in Australia and New Zealand, with a growing presence in Asia, Europe and America. We are a well-known and trusted brand, and have been ranked by Hitwise as the number 1 Travel - Destinations & Accommodation site in Australia for four years running.

Our accommodation suppliers are always in control of their rates and allotment via our secure Supplier Extranet, and backed up by our award-winning 24/7 Customer Service Centre.

Listing your inventory, taking part in our extra promotions and inclusion in our direct marketing campaigns are all free of charge, and our margin on confirmed bookings is one of the lowest in the industry. Our terms and conditions are set out in our Supplier Agreement, which you can read as part of our registration process.

We'd love to work with you to help you sell more of your rooms through Wotif.com!

BOOKING.COM

The Company
Booking.com B.V., part of Priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN), owns and operates Booking.com™, the leading worldwide online hotel reservations agency by room nights sold, attracting over 30 million unique visitors each month via the Internet from both leisure and business markets worldwide.

Established in 1996, Booking.com B.V. guarantees the best prices for any type of property, ranging from small independent hotels to a five star luxury through Booking.com. The Booking.com website is available in 41 languages and offers over 120000 hotels in 99 countries.

Booking.com B.V. is based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and is supported internationally with offices in: Amsterdam - Athens - Barcelona - Berlin - Buenos Aires - Cambridge - Cape Town - Dubai - Dublin - Grand Rapids - Istanbul - London - Loulé (PT) - Lyon - Madrid - Montréal - Moscow - Munich - New York - Orlando - Paris - Rome - San Francisco - São Paulo - Shanghai - Singapore - Stockholm - Sydney - Tokyo - Vienna - Warsaw - Zürich.

Booking.com B.V. is registered with the trade register of the Chamber of Commerce in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, under registration number 31047344. VAT registration number is NL805734958B01. Registration number with Dutch Data Protection Authority is 1288246.

The Team
As a result of the market leading growth of Booking.com, the Booking.com group of companies currently employs over 1800 professionals to ensure the best possible online service and support.

Our Vision
Through Booking.com, we are committed to offering an informative, user-friendly website with the best rates guaranteed. Our goal is to provide business and leisure travellers worldwide with a pleasant, efficient and cost-effective way to book hotel accommodations.

Our multilingual customer service team and call centre provide dedicated assistance to all our customers.

Benefits for customers

Lowest Prices
Booking.com guarantees the best hotel rates in both cities and regional destinations - ranging from small family hotels to luxury hotels.

No reservation fees
The Booking.com reservation service is free of charge. We do not charge you any booking fees, administration fees, or cancellation fees.

Secure booking
The Booking.com reservation system is secure and your credit card and personal information is encrypted. We work to high standards and guarantee your privacy. For further details, please check our Privacy Statement.

Benefits for hoteliers
More than 150000 room nights booked every day. Booking.com provides a cost-effective commission based model, a network of over 4000 distribution partners and a personalised account management service to help you optimise your revenue.

ORBITZ

Orbitz Worldwide is a leading global online travel company that uses innovative technology to enable leisure and business travelers to research, plan and book a broad range of travel products. Orbitz Worldwide owns a portfolio of consumer brands that includes Orbitz (www.orbitz.com), CheapTickets (www.cheaptickets.com), ebookers (www.ebookers.com), HotelClub (www.hotelclub.com), RatesToGo (www.ratestogo.com), the Away Network (www.away.com) and corporate travel brand Orbitz for Business (www.orbitzforbusiness.com).

Build New Relationships and Increase Your Bookings

Leveraging the industry’s most recognizable online travel brands, we welcome more than 20 million unique visitors to our websites each month, including Orbitz.com, CheapTickets.com, ebookers.com, HotelClub.com, RatesToGo.com, Asia-Hotels.com and OrbitzforBusiness.com. Our global reach allows us to deliver your standalone and packaged hotel products and services to both leisure and business travelers worldwide. In addition, the Orbitz Worldwide Distribution and Affiliate businesses further extend your travel products and services into the marketplace through our relationships with some the industry’s largest travel and e-commerce websites.

World Class Hotel Booking Experience
Orbitz Worldwide is a pioneer in the hotel booking experience. With more than 85,000 hotels in our global supplier network, we’ve introduced some of the industry’s most compelling offers with the Low Price Guarantee, Hotel Price Assurance and TotalPrice hotel search results. We recently launched another ground-breaking innovation with the new Orbitz hotel search experience to make it easier for our mutual customers to find the right hotel at the right time.

The new Orbitz hotel search experience includes:

In-path side-by-side comparison of hotel details
Expandable, interactive maps showing both hotel location and real-time room rate pricing
Google Street View showing the hotel and its surrounding neighborhood
Filters and sort options based on price, star-rating, review score and amenities
Saved Hotels enabling customers to create “speed dial” shortcuts to favorite hotels

Industry-leading Promotions and Merchandising
Orbitz Worldwide offers a diverse, flexible array of promotional and merchandising opportunities to accelerate your room night growth. Your online marketing opportunities range from featured campaigns, social media outreach and search engine placements to time-sensitive promotions like our 48-Hour hotel sales.

In addition, Orbitz Worldwide invests in regional advertising, broadcast television commercials and other above-the-line marketing activities to drive brand awareness and attract new consumers to our sites. As a result, your properties will benefit from both broad-based and targeted customer pull and the ability to manage pricing through the use of promotions and opaque dynamic packaging.

Hotel Supplier Extranet Now Online
Orbitz Worldwide provides an industry leading user friendly web based platform for hotels to streamline updates to their hotels content, imagery, rates and availability. Through this platform, hotels can quickly update their hotels information and distribution strategies for immediate release to a global consumer base. Hotel partners around the world trust Orbitz technology to quickly and efficiently update rates and availability with ease ensuring consumers have the most up to date information about your property. Through this global extranet, Orbitz is able to offer exposure to its global portfolio of brands.

TRIP ADVISOR

TripAdvisor® is the world's largest travel site, enabling travellers to plan and have the perfect trip. TripAdvisor offers trusted advice from real travellers and a wide variety of travel choices and planning features (including TripAdvisor Mobile and TripAdvisor Trip Friends) with seamless links to booking tools.

TripAdvisor® Media Group, operated by TripAdvisor LLC, attracts more than 50 million unique monthly visitors* across 18 popular travel brands: www.tripadvisor.com, www.airfarewatchdog.com, www.bookingbuddy.com, www.cruisecritic.com, www.everytrail.com, www.familyvacationcritic.com, www.flipkey.com, www.holidaylettings.co.uk, www.holidaywatchdog.com, www.independenttraveler.com, www.onetime.com, www.seatguru.com, www.sniqueaway.com, www.smartertravel.com, www.travel-library.com, www.travelpod.com, www.virtualtourist.com and www.kuxun.cn. TripAdvisor-branded sites alone make up the largest travel community in the world, with more than 40 million unique monthly visitors*, 20 million members, and over 45 million reviews and opinions. The sites operate in 27 countries worldwide, including China under daodao.com (http://www.daodao.com). TripAdvisor also operates TripAdvisor for Business, a dedicated division that provides the tourism industry access to TripAdvisor’s millions of monthly visitors. The division includes Business Listings, which allows hoteliers to connect directly to millions of researching travellers, and Vacation Rentals, which helps property managers and individual home owners list their properties and showcase hotel alternatives.

TripAdvisor and the sites comprising the TripAdvisor Media Group are operating companies of Expedia, Inc. (NASDAQ: EXPE).

TripAdvisor and the TripAdvisor logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of TripAdvisor LLC in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other logos or product and company names mentioned herein may be the property of their respective owners.

LEVART DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS

About Levart

"Levart" is Travel spelt backwards. We are turning travel around for the accommodation sector of the hospitality industry.

Levart was established in 2001 to assit the properties to control the distribution of information through their websites. This included the provision of a website booking engine that provides immediate confiormation of the booking to the client. In 2003 we included Channel Control (Channel Management) in the options available to clients.

Levart understands the needs of the property and how online distribution and direct online booking needs can be addressed with technological solutions.

Hotel Booking Engine

The Booking Engine is the processing power plant for an Accommodation Providers website. It provides the functionality for the property to distribute its available accommodation options and rates to not only the property's own website visitors but to a wide and new distribution audience over and above traditional travel agents and wholesalers through portals.

Channel Control

Channel control is a powerfull tool that distributes the property's rates and inventory to third party sites insluding TPI's, OTA's, Wholeslares and the GDS. Interfaces also have been created with leading Property Management Sytems (PMS) where inventory and rates can flow from the PMS to Levart and onto the Third Party Sites and bookings flow from the Third Party Sites to Levart and into the PMS.

The system utilises pooled inventory and allows the property to manage their distribtion to many channels in a simple and efficient manner.

Quickbeds

Leading online accommodation booking provider and Flight Centre owned company, Quickbeds.com recently underwent a multi-million dollar relaunch, revolutionising their business and establishing them as a trusted industry voice.

Spearheaded by general manager John Feenaghty, who joined Quickbeds.com in 2008, the relaunch included a complete re vamp of the brand and website and cheeky new brand image.

Quickbeds spent over a year building a new platform for the brand and looking at their target audience, which was largely B2B before 2010. To be competitive with their distribution, rates and range of properties on offer, John decided to take the stance of being a ‘cheap’ brand in pricing, rather than high end or middle of the road.

In the online accommodation booking arena, competition is fierce, but there Quickbeds has been able to capture significant share of this space with their new brand positioning at the budget end of the market. John said, “Standing out from the crowd is crucial to survive, which is why we developed our ‘cheap and easy’ brand positioning and tagline. We’re cheap on price, offering good value deals and our new website is easy to navigate and transact on – this is our unique selling point.”

To bring the cheap and easy tagline to life, Quickbeds decided to enlist controversial ex AFL player Warwick Capper onboard as their campaign face. What were they thinking? John said, “Ultimately we wanted to be irreverent, offbeat, fun and cheeky. For us it’s all about living up to our tagline and letting the public know we’re out there. If you don’t make any noise, no one can hear you!”

Quickbeds used Warwick across all their new branding, on the website and in a successful run of TVC’s. These have been a great conversation starter and talking point amongst the public, as Warwick plays up to being ‘cheap and easy’. Since launching the TVC’s coupled with a PR campaign, Quickbeds has noted a 70% increase in sales.

John said, “We’ve found the new tagline sums up what the modern traveller wants in a nutshell from their accommodation booking experience. By using Warwick to speak to our customers, we’ve reinforced the message of what we’re about and how we differ from our competitors.”

Quickbeds has embraced social media with open arms, integrating a campaign into their overall strategy – and it’s worked! Facebook and Twitter became a key driver for sharing their new TVC’s which were promoted through YouTube. Social Media ties in with offline and online promotions, ads and sales, making it a vital communication tool to engage with customers. John said, “Being an online brand, it’s been really successful utilising all the online tools available to us.”

Quickbeds has managed to gain a following of over 12,000 Facebook fans, which is more than any of their competitors. They were able to grow this important fan base through Facebook CPC advertising, site-wide promotion and engaging content such as competitions and giveaways. John said, “When we partner with properties to give away free nights to our fans, this typically drives between 60-80% of traffic to a property’s page on Quickbeds.com for the period of the promotion. This is a significant amount of traffic which benefits both our partners and the overall site.”

Facebook has also been used in conjunction with offline promotions to encourage more fans. For example, following a promotional stunt with Warwick Capper in Sydney city, Quickbeds uploaded an album of people from who had their photo taken with Warwick.
Since launching the new campaign Quickbeds has seen an increase in organic search engine traffic for brand-related terms of 41%, which identifies increased brand awareness.

In terms of search engine optimisation (SEO), Quickbeds focuses on updating the website frequently with unique content. Their blog also forms a key part of this strategy. So far this has increased organic search traffic by 110% since September 2010.
The decision to re-launch the website and inject some personality into the brand by using Warwick Capper has set a platform for company growth and ensured the brand stands out from the crowd.

Moving forward Quickbeds are taking opportunities to enhance the corporate market booking experience, for example, by introducing market leading functionality and technology that provides a new map function. This enables consumers to search for accommodation near a particular place or landmark.

In response to consumer demand, the 99 day booking window has also recently been extended to 365 days giving travel agents the ability to sell into peak periods further out and consumers to plan their holiday breaks further in advance.
With the domestic leisure market going strong, the smarter package options operators are creating will help grow their market share. Thinking outside the box and creating value-add offerings for consumers, such as the Mancation “holidays for the boys” are attracting more consumers and again standing out from the crowd.

The Quickbeds site is under a constant cycle of improvement and will continue to offer consumers more choice and the cheapest prices.