Two almost simultaneous bits of news emerging today showing how traditional travel technology firms have turned to disciplines in media to establish new revenue streams.
At one end of the scale, GDS giant Travelport has announced it has created a global division to handle online display advertising for its airline, hotel and car hire customers on third party platforms in travel agencies.
The other end sees Avvio establish an affiliate marketing system of its own to run advertising campaigns on publisher sites identified as strong lead-gen contenders for small or independent hotels.
Travelport says ahead of its plan to roll out its Universal Desktop system to all customers later this year it is moving from "primarily a distribution vehicle to a strategic sales and marketing platform" for product suppliers.
Central to the Travelport move is allowing suppliers to build display advertising which showcases its additional product range through ancillaries, such as the upsell of baggage and seat positioning for airlines.
Travelport says the new department will have dedicated advertising account managers as well as a technology support team.
Officials say the company evaluated a number of third party media providers to do the same job but decided to build the system itself.
Avvio, which has created booking engines for hoteliers for around eight years, has built a model where hotel clients can hand over creative advertising duties to the firm and make use of the company's relationships with publishing platforms not normally connected to a wider affiliate network.
Yannis Anastasakis, head of business development at Avvio, says smaller, independent hoteliers have traditionally shied away from working with affiliate networks as many are reluctant to hand over credit card details for a monthly subscription to a system that may not yield results.
The Avvio platform works by only charging the hotel a fee when a booking is made as a result of a click-through on their ad on the network.
The move by Travelport and Avvio is the latest in a line of decisions by technology firms to alter their traditional model to establish different forms of distribution for clients.