Amadeus plans to launch its Travel Audience targeted advertising platform in the UK at the beginning of next year.
Travel Audience enables airlines, online travel agencies and other travel companies to advertise their own targeted offers as well as publish advertisements for other companies' offers.
The distribution giant initially acquired a stake in the advertising platform as part of its Traveltainment purchase in 2006 before going on to acquire the remaining stake three years ago.
According to Amadeus, Travel Audience has been growing steadily in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in the past few years and it now wants to expand to new regions as well as increase its customer base.
Travel Audience head of business development and airline sales Christoph Althoff says there is pressure on travel companies to grab the attention of consumers in more efficient ways, adding that as much as 95% of traffic to a website could be non-converting.
He also says the company is talking to OTAs, hotels and airlines about collecting data about their potential customers to use to create very targeted offers.
But, the publishing element is particularly interesting, not least because the company says one OTA expects to make $1 million in revenue a year from publishing other companies' offers.
Speaking at last week's TTI conference in London, Amadeus UK and Ireland head of product and innovation Clare de Bono pointed to low online conversion rates to explain why an online travel company would look to send traffic elsewhere.
She added that so much of marketing spend to get users to websites delivers no return on investment but by publishing advertisements from others, revenue could be generated from these non-converting users.
"A/B testing has shown these ads have no impact on sales but they do generate an awful lot of revenue."
De Bono also touched on merchandising as part of her three Ms presentation (Mobile, Merchandise, Monetise) with Amadeus watching consumer online buying behaviour closely to see where companies might be able to increase revenue through the sale of ancillaries.
She said there were two strategies currently in play for the display and purchase of ancillaries - the unbundled flight, with the basic fare and the user adding elements such as bags and wifi, and the ready bundled option, with the inclusive price displayed on the results page.
Although it's early days and "still a lot of experimentation going on", the bundled offer is seeing a three-and-a-half times better uptake for selling ancillaries according to one OTA.
NB: Targeted advertising image via Olivier Le Moal/BigStock