Thomas Cook, the UK-based holiday company, has recently launched a new city break and hotel-only offering in the UK as part of its strategic alliance with Expedia Group.
Under the new plan, Thomas Cook will offer a wider range of holiday options at a lower cost of production using Expedia’s hotel supply. The new city-break and hotel-only areas on Thomas Cook’s website use Expedia Group’s technology to deliver hotel content and bookings, and increase the number of hotels available for customers to more than 100,000. Expedia’s advanced technology will help to increase booking on Thomas Cook’s own websites and expand its online business. In the year to date, Thomas Cook UK has increased online sales by 37 percent.
Peter Fankhauser, Chief Executive of Thomas Cook Group, said: ‘The launch of the Expedia Group alliance is an important step forward in our strategy for profitable growth. Plugging in the Expedia Group technology will transform our city break and hotel-only business, offering more choice for our customers and unlocking efficiencies across our organisation. The collaborative approach we’re taking to improve our complementary business for customers is already showing real benefits, and we look forward to harnessing the growth potential that Expedia Group brings.’
Ariane Gorin, President, Expedia Partner Solutions, said: ‘We are happy to team up with Thomas Cook to bring their customers a broader travel selection, aligning perfectly with our strategy to power industry partners. Expedia Group’s platform technology provides partners with optimized tools to help travellers search from the widest range of options when booking their holidays.’
The new city break and hotel-only bookings is part of Thomas Cook’s ‘complementary’ hotel business, offering customers a wide range of hotels options for second holidays and short breaks. This is in addition to Thomas Cook’s core holiday offering that focuses on its own brand hotels and selected partner hotels in sun and beach destinations.
This new scheme follows the launch of Thomas Cook’s hotel sourcing partnership with Webjet Limited in summer 2017. The Webjet partnership resulted in a 51-per-cent increase in overall bedbank bookings in the first half of 2018, Thomas Cook said.
