Cendant’s consumer travel business is to focus on traditional marketing strategies to strengthen its Orbitz brand.

Published: 11 Apr 2006

Cendant’s consumer travel business is to focus on traditional marketing strategies to strengthen its Orbitz brand.

According to FT.com, the plan for Orbitz is traditional marketing strategies even as it overhauls the technology behind Ebookers.

“There is real benefit to bolstering offline marketing even for online performance,” Mitch Truwit, chief executive of Cendant’s global consumer travel unit reportedly said.

“Traditional media has suffered as advertisers shift spending to targeted online marketing, such as keywords on search engines, where customer usage and the return on investment can be closely measured. Online advertising is expected to be the fastest-growing sector of the market this year. The tabular content relating to this article is not available to view. Apologies in advance for the inconvenience caused. Yet Orbitz has ramped up spending on conventional marketing since Mr Truwit joined the company from rival travel website Priceline.com last year,” according to the report.

As per the information available, by the year-end, the company expects Ebookers to have more product offerings and simplified back-end technology, with old technology phased out.

Last year in November, Neal Sunners, CIO, ebookers told EyeforTravel.com: “Ebookers has been acquired by Cendant, which has clearly led to integration challenges into the rest of the Cendant group. We have an ongoing integration programme affecting almost all areas of the business which will have a major bearing on how affective ebookers will be within the online travel market in the future.”

“The online travel market itself is extremely competitive but we are confident that with the fulfillment of our integration strategies we will improve our standing further within the market. Other typical challenges facing us and our competitors are around issues such as speed to market, site stability, use of affective offshore strategies and improving product and experience for the customer,” Sunners had said.