Travelocity and AOL have renewed and expanded their marketing partnership for two years.

Travelocity and AOL have renewed and expanded their marketing partnership for two years.

Published: 04 Apr 2006

Travelocity and AOL have renewed and expanded their marketing partnership for two years.

Under the terms of the agreement, travelocity.com will continue to serve as the exclusive provider of flights, hotels, car rentals, cruises and vacation packages for AOL Travel.

The companies have also agreed to more broadly share technologies and resources moving forward with Travelocity integrating its editorial content and video, traveler reviews, RSS alerts and other personalization features into AOL Travel.

Richard Harris, senior vice president, strategy and distribution for Travelocity said that expanded agreement with AOL supports company’s strategy of focusing “on ensuring that consumers have all the resources to create great travel experiences”.

However, according to MSNBC, the new agreement isn’t the same kind of deal that the two companies originally brokered in the 1990s. “A decade ago -- when AOL ruled online connectivity -- Travelocity and Expedia were the only travel portals that mattered. While AOL was the gateway to reach the web-enabled audience, it was a toss-up as to whether users might pick Travelocity or Expedia for finalising their travel plans,” it reported.

The analysis on the deal between two companies indicate that by providing more editorial content, video clips, and tourist reviews, “it makes the offering stickier and hopefully more persuasive”. MSNBC report also says, “After suffering through three years of subscriber defections, AOL has been beefing up its globally accessible AOL.com stage to attract non-AOL subscribers. Companies like Earthlink and Travelocity will have to be more flexible and far more magnetic.”

“The renewed deal between AOL and Travelocity isn't the big story here. The real question is what each company will do to try to maintain relevancy. The most important factor is that AOL and Travelocity are actually piggybacking on Google to restore AOL’s greatness now that Google acquired a five percent stake in the online connectivity pioneer. That’s certainly one way to hold back extinction. If the other 95 percent of AOL comes through, perhaps they can make these next two years as memorable and material for AOL and Travelocity as the past two years weren’t.”

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