LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM–(Marketwire – Aug. 10, 2010) – GEKKO A new service launches in beta today that will change how publishers commercialise their travel content. Gekko (www.gekko.com), the personal shopping assistant for hotels, is launching GEKKOLinks, which automatically converts mentions of a hotel on a page into an affiliate link. BusinessTraveller.com, the online version of the leading magazine for the frequent business traveller, with more than 1m unique page views per month worldwide, is one of the first publishers to sign up to use the service.
GEKKOLinks will make it much easier for publishers, from bloggers to large media sites, to monetise any travel content. Once a hotel mention has been converted automatically into an affiliate link, a small box will appear with relevant information including availability and prices from multiple booking engines. Readers will be able to book directly from the box without leaving the publisher’s site. The publisher will receive a share of the revenue from any resulting booking.
GEKKOLinks removes the need for publishers to create and manage their own affiliate links. Gekko’s patent pending technology identifies specific and unspecific references to hotels by understanding the context of the articles. The links provided are matched with Gekko’s extensive database of hotels so publishers are given access to relevant content that will help their readers to decide and purchase.
Michel Cassius, CEO of Gekko, commented: “GEKKOLinks provides publishers with a quick and easy way to get additional revenues from their existing content without disrupting the customer experience. GEKKOLinks automatically creates contextual, relevant and transactional affiliate links. Contextual in that our technology understands the context of the articles; relevant as we are giving publishers access to our extensive database of hotels; and transactional as we are making available the booking and price comparison engines from our consumer site, www.gekko.com.”
Mark Caswell, Business Traveller’s online editor, added: “We are pleased to announce this exciting new partnership with Gekko. Historically our booking engine has simply been a place for our users to book a hotel when they have wanted to with a sole provider. This new partnership will allow us not only to offer a booking engine that searches a range of providers to find the best price, but also give readers the ability to search and book with the minimum of clicks from any relevant page of editorial.”
Publishers can easily sign up to the beta programme through Gekko’s partner pages at http://www.gekko.com/gekkolinks/signup.
Gekko, the personal shopping assistant for hotels, which recommends ideal matches for each individual’s preferences, launched save@gekko earlier this year, allowing hotel comparison for travellers to compile travel-based links, information and destinations whilst browsing the web. The service creates a personal shortlist, which allows the users to compare and select the right hotel at the best available price. The individual selections become the basis for highly personalised recommendations and for future hotel bookings.