Hotelscombined plans further global expansion

Australian hotel search engine hotelscombined.com is building momentum in Europe, with plans in place to move into non-English speaking markets.

Last week it added Ebookers and easytobook.com to the list of hotel supply partners. Ebookers joins other Orbitz Worldwide businesses including ratestogo and hotelclub.

OTAs such as Expedia and lastminute are also partners, with TUI Travel’s laterooms.com and Thomas Cook Groups’ hotels4u also part of its offer. Hilton and InterContinental are featured as well.

Earlier this moth, Travolution reported that Skyscanner signed a white-label deal with hoteslcombined.com so that it could add vertical search for hotels to its established flights and car rental channels.

A hotelscombined.com spokesperson told Travolution that it had seen “some interest, but nothing to concrete” from other big name sites about a similar tie-up.

The interest in hotelscombined.com’s white-label product contrasts with travelsupermarket.com, which has gone in the other direction and no longer white-labels its search engine to partners.

Further developments in its link-up with Skyscanner will be revealed over the coming months, hotelscombined said. Its link with Skyscanner has prompted interest from other hotel inventory providers and affiliates. Hotelscombined told Travolution: “The next big move for us is to more aggressively move into the non-English markets with a relaunch of some of the international versions of our site.

Elsewhere, ebookers parent company Orbitz Worldwide (OWW) has relaunched its trip.com brand as a "facilitated search site".

A spokesperson told Travolution that OWW had had a similar function on its content-based site, away.com, but decided it made more sense to have a standalone brand.

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