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eBay: now coming to a travel site near you
eBay, the world’s largest marketplace, has added a booking facility to enable it to become a full-scale booking platform for travel services.
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eBay was previously only of limited suitability for the sale of holidays or hotel stays because the system lacked a booking facility,” the company says, but it has now added Cultuzz Digital Media. “This not only enables users to buy a voucher for the offers listed but also to carry out booking at the same time.”
Cultuzz has so far sold some 750’000 hotel accommodation packages on 20 eBay markets worldwide for hotel customers. Within the travel categories, Cultuzz is the only provider worldwide able to display the current availabilities of a listing and enable direct booking from the hotel’s inventory after the purchase, the company says.
Technically, the current availability of a listing are queried from Cultuzz’ own database system "CultSwitch." This system is a web service to which hotel management systems (PMS), destinations or central reservation systems (CRS) can send their availabilities and rates via XML.
Sales via eBay can take place in either the "Auction" or "Buy it Now" formats. While an auction starts with a low price and the highest bidder wins the item, listings made under "Buy it Now" are bought at a fixed price.
“We wish to develop eBay into a strong sales channel for travel services and are therefore quite prepared to give other system providers the opportunity to use eBay as a sales channel for their travel products within the scope of a cooperation partnership," said Dr. Reinhard Vogel, Managing Director of Cultuzz Digital Media.
By David Wilkening
David
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