Cheapflights Turns to Percussion Software to Upgrade Flight and Resort Information to Global Travelers
PHILADELPHIA, PA – May 15, 2006 – Cheapflights, which pioneered internet travel price search and comparison, has chosen Percussion Software's enterprise content management solution Rhythmyx to improve the timing and delivery of content such as resort information and special timed offers. Rhythmyx will be used for the company's travel price search and comparison sites in the USA and in the UK which publish over one million flight, holiday and accommodation deals from over 500 travel partners and which each month are accessed by 5.25 million unique global users.
Cheapflights' custom data management system identifies and sorts up to 15 million deals a day from its travel industry advertising partners and is able to present the best and up-to-the-minute offers to its users. Rhythmyx will allow Cheapflights' users to make more informed decisions about those search results by presenting additional information linked to those results, including resort information.
Milenko Beslic, Head of Technology (USA), Cheapflights, said, "We are always looking for ways to improve user experience. The delivery of additional content to Cheapflights' users to help them make more informed decisions will certainly help build traffic still further as well as loyalty. This will ultimately increase our revenues by driving even more highly qualified leads to our travel advertising partners as well as enhancing loyalty from both users and advertising partners."
Much of the additional content that will be made available will be used throughout all the company's Web sites and controlled via the Rhythmyx solution. Rhythmyx will be used to control the delivery of commercially sensitive and time critical content such as special flight or hotel offers which coincide with key calendar dates.
A robust ECM solution, Rhythmyx manages web content, documents, digital assets, portal content and scanned images. The solution offers rich functionality out-of-the-box, allowing customization to be focused on meeting specific needs, and easy ongoing administration by IT staff. By delivering a range of pre-built application functionality through Rhythmyx FastForward for Web Content Management (WCM), Rhythmyx allows organizations to implement the functionality they need today while ensuring that they can meet tomorrow's needs with an extensible, standards-based architecture. With the industry's only De-Coupled Delivery™ architecture, Intelligent Relationships and Active Assembly, Rhythmyx solves the key content management challenges of enabling true content reuse and cost-effective multi-channel delivery.
Milenko Beslic continued, "After an exhaustive consideration of our options we concluded that Rhythmyx offered us the very best solution. Rhythmyx's De-Coupled Delivery architecture and use of XML standards allowed us to leverage our existing technology so deployment time and resource utilization was much improved. The advanced workflow management and integration with standard word processing applications were also a key selling point for our editorial teams."
Rhythmyx offers Cheapflights a scaleable content management system enabling it to track and streamline the content authorization processes through Rhythmyx's audit trails and workflow capabilities. The software's De-Coupled Delivery architecture, which separates the management of content from the content delivery environment, allows the content to be published to the company's multiple sites.
Barry Reynolds, CEO, Percussion Software, said, "Cheapflights is purely a web-based business and customer experience is just as important as providing great offers. Providing supporting content at the right time and place is key to helping Cheapflights' users to decide on a particular deal or to inspire them to book a further hotel or flight. Rhythymx will help Cheapflights to continue its strong growth performance by providing more travel information and choices for its millions of users."
About Cheapflights
Founded in 1996 and profitable since launch, Cheapflights.co.uk pioneered the travel price comparison model in the UK and introduced pay-per-click in the UK in 2000.
Cheapflights is one of the few British internet companies successfully to establish an operation in the USA with Cheapflights.com. Launched in May 2003, it is already in the top 14 USA travel sites.
The Company has also recently launched UK and USA "Flight News" blog sites with a view to these becoming major interactive communities to inform and assist travel consumers.
Cheapflights does not sell any travel products. Each day, it displays over one million constantly updated prices supplied by hundreds of travel partners worldwide. These deals can be accessed online or by telephone direct with the advertiser from links or information on our site. This makes Cheapflights one of the most comprehensive independent publishers online of flight and other travel deals available and the Company's global unique user numbers support this, having reached 5,250,000 unique users in January 2005.
Cheapflights estimates that it generated travel product sales of over £1 billion for its advertising partners in 2005. These advertisers read like a Who's Who of the travel world - ranging from British Airways, Thomson, Expedia, Travelocity and Thomas Cook to specialist operators like STA Travel, Llama Travel and Iglu.com.
Cheapflights' independent status as an online travel price search and comparison and travel news site makes it a natural starting point for finding travel deals and up-to-date travel industry information.
