Pegasus taps VFM Leonardo for ODD and Content Hub

June 24, 2009 | Hospitality Industry

Pegasus will integrate VFM Leonardo’s VScape Digital Asset Management System with the ODD, which will allow hotels to easily update and manage their visual content directly in the ODD.

Pegasus Solutions and VFM Leonardo have formed a strategic partnership to provide hotels industry-leading end-to-end visual and descriptive content management and distribution. The agreement will allow Pegasus, which maintains the largest collection of electronically bookable hotels in the world, to leverage VFM Leonardo’s VScape Digital Asset Management System and visual content library for more than 90,000 hotels in the Pegasus online distribution database (ODD).

Optimizing the dominant positions of Pegasus as the industry leader for distribution of descriptive content and inventory, and VFM Leonardo for distribution of visual content such as photos, virtual tours and video, this strategic partnership brings hotels an unrivaled offering for content distribution, according to Mike Kistner, president, CEO and chairman of Pegasus Solutions.

“Hotels need an arsenal of tools, including visual content, to compete in a market where converting online travel shoppers has become more complex,” said Kistner. “VFM Leonardo has already taken the top spot in the industry for visual content management and distribution, which is why we’ve selected them to further improve the content distribution options for our hotels and for Pegasus-powered travel sites.”

Pegasus will integrate VFM Leonardo’s VScape Digital Asset Management System with the ODD, which will allow hotels to easily update and manage their visual content directly in the ODD. Additionally, Pegasus and VFM Leonardo will offer ContentHub™, a tool that enables hotels to seamlessly access, update and manage their images and text through a single interface. Both the VScape integration and ContentHub will allow visuals and text to be presented consistently to the global distribution systems (GDSs), and Pegasus alternative distribution system (ADS) customers, which include major travel websites, search engines, tour operators and travel consortia.

Delivering a visual story accurately and efficiently to thousands of online channels and websites utilized by travel shoppers during their hotel selection process translates into increased bookings, according to Paolo Boni, President and CEO of VFM Leonardo.

“Better merchandised hotels get more bookings,” said Boni. “Research actually shows online travel shoppers are 67 percent more likely to book a hotel that displays virtual tours and a staggering 89 percent more likely when a hotel displays video. Pegasus is the ‘best of breed’, and we are very proud of our partnership with them and their selection of VScape to manage and distribute hotel visual content. We firmly believe we can now better deliver hotel visual content through Pegasus with a complete solution that helps hotels better merchandise online and increase their bookings.”