With the goal of boosting their hotel bookings, VIA Travel Stavanger launched the internal campaign “Har du flaks?” (“Do you feel lucky?”) in collaboration with Amadeus. And the results? Two months later, they had achieved a 13 per cent rise in hotel reservations.

In 2004, nearly 1.5 billion airline reservations and some 3 billion non-air bookings were recorded worldwide¹. These figures include bookings not made via GDS. In other words, travel agencies have a vast untapped potential to increase their sales.
There is a myth circulating in both the private and business sectors that it does not pay to book hotel rooms through travel agencies. Additionally, many companies believe that they will lose the benefits of their hotel agreements if they elect to book through a travel agency. These may be two important explanations for why only 50 million out of a total of 1.9 billion hotel bookings are made via GDS, according to a study².