Yapta turned to Priceline'sBooking.com to plug holes in hotel-search data from Orbitz, particularly in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
Yapta was slated to integrate Booking.com into the Yapta website this morning.
Previously, when users searched for hotels on Yapta, they could book the properties through Orbitz and Yapta's hotel-rate tracking service used Orbitz room-rate data to monitor rate drops. For example, the following Yapta search used Orbitz data:
With the integration of Booking.com, hotel-rate searches will still default to Orbitz, but Booking.com data will kick in if the property is not within Orbitz's database.
"For example, if a traveler wants to track pricing on a particular hotel in Prague, and Orbitz doesn't have that particular hotel property in its inventory, then Yapta will serve hotel inventory from Booking.com that fits that query or request," says Yapta spokesman Jeff Pecor.
Orbitz Worldwide and Priceline, which owns Booking.com, are competitors, which each trying to build its global hotel business. Booking.com has outpaced Orbitz and other rivals in its efforts.
With both Orbitz and Booking.com in the fold, Yapta says travelers can track room rates on more than 196,000 properties around the world and can sign up for email alerts when the rates decrease.
Yapta launched its room-rate monitoring service in March 2009 and says it has notified travelers about more than $350 million in potential savings.