Opodo taps hotel.de for hotel reservations

September 20, 2007 | Online Travel

Gone are the ambitious plans of Opodo to build their own hotel product, the latest news from hotel.de, a leading German online hotel reservation portal, suggest that Opodo now opts for a complete integration of hotel.de's hotel inventory for its sites in Germany, UK, France and Italy.

hotel.de AG, a leading online reservation service in Germany for hotels worldwide, entered a major partnership with the Pan-European online travel service Opodo.

As an affiliate partner, Opodo has integrated hotel.de’s complete hotel offerings into its website and is thus able to offer its users inexpensive accommodation prices and a selection of more than 210,000 hotels. Heinz Raufer, CEO of hotel.de AG, expects to see additional booking volumes in a double-digit million range in the first year of the partnership already. ‘This partnership has provided us with access to another major group of booking customers.’ Opodo operates a leading online travel portal in Germany at opodo.de and is also represented by proprietary websites in the UK, France and Italy, among other markets.

The third quarter has also been developing very positively for hotel.de AG. This is underlined by a new record level of bookings reported by the company in September.

On one single day customers booked almost 17,000 overnight stays, equivalent to a booking volume of Euro 1.67 million, via hotel.de and its international TravelRes brand. ‘New key account customers and our increased international expansion have helped us to set a further new record’, commented Raufer proudly with regard to the positive news. The company plans to intensify its activities in the Italian market and to open a further office in Spain before the end of the current year.