Ebookers focuses on profitability

With Orbitz’s online travel site, ebookers, not exactly reporting record profits, the company is eager to purvey the image of the site being on the up and up, and Orbitz has reported ebookers’ first quarter earnings in a light of optimism. Orbitz spokeswoman Marsha C. Williams says that, “losses [at Ebookers] have been coming down,” while CEO Steve Bernhart says, “We’re doing our first multiple language site in Belgium [and] once we get beyond that, there are no major new capabilities that we need to test or introduce for the first time… The cycle time and rolling outs for many countries is much much shorter.”

With the systems already established and shorter turnaround times for different language markets, the cause of the company’s financial woes seem to be behind them. Bernhart says that the site’s inventory of available and participating properties has grown threefold, making the opportunity for profit all the more apparent. “This is driving strong traffic from the UK to US locations, with gross bookings for hotels in the US [in Q1 08] at almost 9 times Q1 2007 levels,” he continued, showing strongly which markets can pull ebookers out of the red.

Thank you to travolution.co.uk for the quotes above, for more information please visit their website.