Developer Hub News

• How Mobile Tech is Changing Travel

• 4 Ways to Fatten Up Your Affiliate Site

• Added room images to room availability response.
• Added new request to acquire all room images.

• What Else? Gogobot 2.0, Expedia-Kaleva, American Airlines DC, Travelocity Business, Carsolize
• Expedia Affiliate Network ties up deal with Finnish agency Kaleva

From: Saturday July 21, 2012 7:30 AM GMT (Friday July 20, 2012 11:30 PM PST)

To: Saturday July 21, 2012 8:30 AM GMT (Saturday July 21, 2012 12:30 AM PST)

While performing EAN System and Database Maintenance, no EAN resources will be available during this time. The outage period is expected to be a minimum of 30 minutes with a maximum of 60 minutes to complete. Please make any necessary arrangements or inform any individuals in your organization in order that all parties are aware that no EAN resources or inventory will be available during the scheduled time.

• Hey! Wise up, Feeding The Beast in travel is not such a bad thing

• Credit Card Guide
• Getting Started Guide
• Self Managed Newsletter Subscriptions
• PHP Get Payment Info Example
• PHP Auto Complete

• Scoot for Expedia
• Expedia Affiliate Network links with Scoot for distribution deal

Today THack participants will be presenting their hacks at Soho Hotel at 2pm. Here is a list of presenters:

• Frommers (live)
• AddToTrip 1 (video)
• Richard Toolan from Mobile Travel Technologies (live)
• Derrick Johnson (video)
• Gillian Morris/Elliott Blatt (live)
• John Ludgate (live)
• DataArt (live and video)
• Amadeus (live)
• AddtoTrip 2 (video)
• Tal Weiss from Evature (video)
• Kevin O'Sullivan from SITA (live)

Developers show off their ideas and creativity in travel - EAN Sponsored

• EAN Enables airtickets.gr to Offer Combined Flight and Hotel Deals
• New Rules of (Affiliate) site architecture – Martin McDonald at A4U
• How to Identify a Link Profile Susceptible to Google Penguin

• New sample code for PHP Reservation Request.
• Modifications to TripAdvisor elements. All TripAdvisor elements now returned in all responses.

• Expedia.com dominates online travel bookings

The global travel business has a lot of room for expansion. The total market is estimated to be about $1 trillion, and Expedia customers consume about $30 billion of that.

"We're the biggest travel company in the world, and we have 3 percent of the market. We think there's a lot of room in this industry for both us and our competitors."

EAN will once again be sponsoring THack, the travel hack-a-thon developed by Tnooz.com.  T-hackers will be given 2 weeks to work on their projects and on June 28th developers will convene in London Soho Hotel to present their creations to a live audience.

THack returns to London – time for developers to show off their ideas and creativity in travel - EAN Sponsored

• After Google Penguin, Travel Sites Need to Get Serious About Inbound Marketing
• The Importance of Branding a Travel Site

• Tips for turning lookers into bookers
• How an API Can Transform Your Enterprise
• How to boost your website conversion rates

Hotel Collect properties (supplierType=S, W, V) can be booked ONLINE ONLY, therefore a disclaimer must be made on these listings that the property cannot be booked by phone when dialing the call centers.

• If a user contacts the call center and asks to book one of these availabilities, they will be instructed to go back to the website to reserve online.

By informing users of the proper way to make these bookings, less call center sales will be lost and your own gross profit will increase.

This month our host was Jason Dickson, EAN's Head of Site Optimization and Conversion, who led a session titled Six Easy Steps To Optimize Conversion On Your Website.

Miss the webinar? Visit content created from his research in the Best Practices section on Optimizing Sales.

Our next session is on May 9, 2012 with David Hughes presenting Best Practices For Website Design And A Superior User Experience, so register today.

New SEO Blogs:

• Local Search, your site, & Google Updates
• Google Panda: How our Managed Partners Fought Back
• 50 Google Updates, what does it mean?

More about EAN Webinars

Venere properties (supplierType=V) can be booked ONLINE ONLY, therefore a disclaimer must be made on these listings that the property cannot be booked by phone when dialing the call centers.

• If a user contacts the call center and asks to book one of these availabilities, they will be instructed to go back to the website to reserve online.

By informing users of the proper way to make these bookings, less call center sales will be lost and your own gross profit will increase.

• How To Boost Your Conversion Rates
• Let Them Eat Cake
• Expedia: 6 ways for Affiliates to Combat Google Panda Spankings

The legacy Hotels API 200631 will be removed on December 31, 2012.

If you have not yet begun to update from this version to the new version, time is running out. The longer you wait to complete your upgrade, the more critical your development timeline becomes. Begin the process now by visiting the Transition Guide and following the Step by Step Instructions.

For assistance in other languages download and visit our translated materials.

New content has been added to the Developer Hub:

• Mobile Applications Best Practices outlines tips and guidelines on developing fast and easy-to-use mobile solutions with the EAN Hotels API.
• Known Issues addresses some of the most commonly raised issues with the Hotels API and provides workarounds where available. This page will be updated as known issues are resolved.

Search Engine Watch featured articles by Jeff Slipko, EAN SEO Manager:

• How Affiliate Sites Can Best Exploit SEO discusses the best SEO methods for affiliate sites, highlighting the latest challenges from search engines and the benefits of targeting based off of keyword analysis.
• 5 Tips to Increase Conversion on Your Site goes beyond SEO to highlight good site practices that capitalize on search engine rankings.

Travel Weekly published an opinion piece by Benoit Jolin, EAN VP Global Product & Marketing:

• Opinion: High street agents need not shy away from becoming 'web warriors'discussing the opportunity for growth in typical travel agent businesses as they embrace online retailing.

Tnooz featured an article bylined by Jason Dickson, EAN Head of Site Optimization.

• Online frustration shows travel companies still not getting the basics right merges some recent PhoCusWright-Amadeus research with his expertise in site optimization; a great critique of online travel retailing and the opportunity that exists.

If you're confused about why Venere and Hotel Collect hotel suppliers return pricing differently and concerned about setting proper booking expectations our new content pages have the answers.

They outline how they compare to Expedia Collect properties, the proper way to display them and how to meet launch requirements with these inventory streams.

Car Rental and Air API documentation is now available by permission only for managed account partners. We preemptively granted access to as many active users as possible, but if you find you still need access, contact your personal account manager. Only select accounts will have access to these APIs. No other accounts will be granted access at this time.

Visit the Newly Enhanced & Expanded Best Practices Chapter for the latest tips and advice

To help EAN partners and developers better evaluate the use of the EAN API and to also make the most of those resources available to everyone, review the new Best Practices chapter now.

It's been expanded with new content for specific affiliate types, as well as categorized topics to fit a variety of considerations that are employed when developing a travel site. Use these best practices as our best advice to give users the best experience possible, bypass common mistakes made with the use of the API, and the best way to take advantage of the functionality provided.

Translated Hotels V3 documentation is now available on the Developer Hub!

We are now offering our FAQs, best practices, launch requirements, and the essential requests and responses for using the Hotels V3 API in six different languages. Click below for the language of your choice:

• » 繁體中文 - Traditional Chinese (zh_TW)
• » Español (ES)
• » 日本語 - Japanese (JA)
• » ภาษาไทย - Thai (TH)
• » Português (Brasil) (pt_BR)
• » 한국어 - Korean (KO)

The above documentation is not a comprehensive translation of all of the pages on the Developer Hub, but we are working hard to bring even more translated content to you in the months ahead. Stay tuned!

To help affiliates better evaluate and monitor SEO / SEM campaigns market, region, superRegion, theme, online, and tripAdvisorRating have been added to the Itinerary Response.

Review the new complete Step-by-Step Version Upgrade Guide.

You can now recover both your username and password for the Affiliate Center should you forget them. Just look for the request links at the bottom of the login box on the Affiliate Center login page.

Did you know "less is more" when it comes to displaying room availability on your hotel list results? Review the best practices for displaying room types for hotel and room availability searches to maximize your conversions.