45% Growth for FastBooking in 2007

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. October 14, 2008

FEBRUARY 18, 2008. FastBooking, the expert in on-line hotel booking solutions, has announced turnover growth of 45% compared with 2006. The company, which employs over 130 staff, now has 3700 client hotels throughout the world. Five hundred and eighty new establishments joined FastBooking in 2007, including the H^otel Beau Rivage in Geneva, the Ca'Sagredo Hotel in Venice, the Royal Plaza on Scotts in Singapore, the Rathbone in London and the H^otel Square in Paris.

FastBooking has now seen major growth for seven consecutive years, with turnover progressing from EUR200 million in 2006 to EUR290 million in 2007 (+45%). The company, which has recently attracted major investment from 3i and Edmond de Rothschild Investment Partners (EdRIP), now has considerable scope for development and the clear ambition to take the lead in Europe.

During 2007, a total of 2.1 million roomnights were reserved through all of FastBooking's solutions: Booking Engine installed on hotels'websites, Internet Distribution and GDS/IDS distribution. Europe remains FastBooking's key market, representing 80% of business volume and growth of over 40%. At the same time, the Asian market, a strategic centre for the company's development in 2008, showed a growth rate of 65%.

The first beneficiaries of this growth are FastBooking's client hotels, who have seen their Internet performance rates among the best in the market. Richard Kefs, CEO and co-founder of FastBooking, attributes some of this success to the "revenue optimization" service, a feature specific to FastBooking that is offered to hoteliers in order to improve the results obtained via their own sites. "Each FastBooking client hotel benefits from personalised advice from our teams, who are experienced in Internet sales optimisation techniques. With their expertise in hotel websites, they can carry out comprehensive audits and suggest extremely effective solutions for improvement: performance analysis, site optimisation, price positioning, search engine rankings etc." explains Richard Kefs

At the heart of the company's produts and services portfolio designed to help independent hotels and chains implement an effective commercial strategy using the Internet, the FastBooking Engine was adopted by 580 new clients in 2007. In parallel, the GDS/IDS historical distribution channels retained a significant share of hotel bookings, as shown by the 600 clients using the GDS/IDS connection interface integrated into the Booking Engine.

In addition, the real-time competitive monitoring tool, FastBooking Checker, and the tool for updating prices and availability across all sales channels, FastBooking Updater, both launched in late 2006, have confirmed their success with over 350 hotels using them by the end of 2007. Finally, as well as providing its on-line marketing and distribution tools, FastBooking supported 400 hotels in their search engine optimisation strategy, taking responsibility for funding and managing sponsored links campaigns.

FastBooking's significant growth in 2007 is also the fruit of strong development in B2C distribution, in which business volume rose by 46%. With traffic of almost 1 million unique visitors in 2007, FastBooking invested over 3 million euros in advertising and promoting its various portals serving hotel clients and signed a number of strategic distribution partnerships. Via FastBooking.com, members of FastBooking's distribution programme can now sell accommodation at Tripadvisor and ViaMichelin, as well as the American sites Nextag, One Time, Travelzoo and Kayak. "For FastBooking's hotel clients, international partnerships with these big-name players represent great potential for extra direct bookings and the promise of increased traffic at their sites via the links to them," explains Jean-Louis Boss, Marketing Director.