By EyeforTravel.com Correspondent in London<br><br>Teletext Holidays has witnessed a significant growth in the visitor&#
Published: 13 Nov 2005
By EyeforTravel.com Correspondent in London
Teletext Holidays has witnessed a significant growth in the visitor's numbers to its site, up 152% year on year, according to its technical director Gordon Maynard.
Maynard attributed the growth to mixture of new products such as accommodation search, cross-reference and also to organic growth in the online business.
"We have completed a programme upgrade to all of the channels on our site on schedule, improving the service to our users, delivering increased response to our advertisers and adapting to changes in the travel market, in particular in relation to the trend towards self-packaging," said Maynard.
In March 2005, the company introduced its Integrated Accommodation Search, which provides consumers with the means to search ten major suppliers of holiday beds in a single search.
"We have integrated this with our existing flights service to provide a simple way for consumers to select flights and accommodation in one place. Our flights and accommodation searches represent a major shift from our Holiday Offers Database in that we are now searching directly into our clients' systems, not requiring them to load offers into our database," said Maynard.
He added that all of Teletext's systems are now based on Web Services, which greatly simplifies connectivity between systems, as well as allowing us to easily provide 'white label' access to company's products.
On Integrated Flights Search, during his presentation at the Travel Distribution Technology 2005 being here in London today, he said the objective was to create a search covering scheduled, charter and low cost flights. He added: (other objectives) real availability required; live searching was decided upon; APIs generally not available, screen scraping was used for scheduled partners and low cost carriers; Integration technology used to combine results; Look to book ratios can cause issues for clients.
On Screen scraping vs XML, Maynard said, "Screen scraping is a pragmatic solution where 'API' interfaces are not available. Eliminates the need for development at the suppliers' end and can be used to collect information without suppliers' cooperation." He added, "Remote clients vulnerable to changes in site design, development resources must always be available to implement changes to scraping software, traffic from the public and partner sites often mixed together and can be clumsy to implement, particularly around the booking process."
Further, on use of standards within Teletext, Maynard said, "Our existing interfaces are not standards-based. Standards have generally not been available and partners have been able to adapt existing interfaces to work with our standards. TORIX is an attractive route for live availability." He added, "One accommodation partner has used TORIX. Interface has been modified from standard to meet needs. Adaptation work still needed - largely around data issues and business logic."
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