AffiliateFuture Launches Flight Search Boxes for Affiliates

[pistol101]

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23 May 2007
AffiliateFuture Launches Flight Search Boxes for Affiliates
AffiliateFuture, the UK’s top affiliate marketing network in travel, has today launched a flight search service for its burgeoning affiliate community.

The new service will enable AffiliateFuture’s affiliates to offer their own site visitors a single search service to seek out the web’s best flight deals.

Further, the search service can be customised through a user-friendly process where the colour and dimensions of the search interface can be created to enable seamless integration with each affiliate site. No programming skills are required and the ability to customise means participating affiliates can brand the search in order to capitalise on the confidence and trust they have established with their communities.

The move comes at a time when more and more holiday bookers are on the look out for services to support the new culture of ‘mix and match’ self-service holiday packaging.

Maz Darvish, CEO of AffiliateFuture says, “We’ve proven the market for affiliate-generated holiday sales with our white label package holiday search service, which has secured revenues for our affiliates and merchants alike.”

“What’s exciting about the flight search service is the wide range of options and the broader market appeal – as flight-only searches free travellers from the perceived inflexibility of a packaged holiday. In terms of seasonality now is the time those travellers with a more independent streak begin to plan and book their various holiday elements. And being able to search for flights on websites they know and trust is a real bonus for those who feel the need to do their own thing. I have every confidence this new service will be a great success.”

The new service is the latest in series of new resources and services launched by AffiliateFuture to help its affiliates maximise their income from affiliate marketing. Recent additions also include TV-style interviews with representatives of merchants including Olympic Holidays and MyTravel providing additional insights on their operations, thereby helping publishers to promote them in a more effective way. The white label package holiday search engine is another innovation exclusive to AffiliateFuture.

The flight search launches with immediate effect.

[Iskander]

I thought I'd come back on this because no-one else has responded yet.

First of all, well done!
This is an excellent idea and, in principle it has been well implemented.
I have a few suggestions to make below and perhaps others can come back and add their own ideas too. All my comments relate specifically to the 300x250 searchbox, though I am sure that in most if not all cases they are relevant to the creatives of other dimensions too.

[Iskander]

1) Heavens above, who wrote the code? It is DREADFUL! My external CSS file completely messed up the layout of the searchbox and so I had to check out the code to find out various IDs to put everything back in order. Here's just one example of what I found at the beginning:

<strong><font size="3"><b><strong></strong></b>
Flight Search</font></strong><br>
<span class="dredtitle">Compare prices of flights from 100\'s of the UKs top 
<br>airlines and flight operators and book directly with them</span>.

WHAT? What a load of unprofessionally written redundant crap.

What's wrong with:

<h2>Flight Search</h2>
<p>Compare prices of flights from 100's of the UKs top <br>
airlines and flight operators and book directly with them.</p>

Please, in future, get someone who knows how to write HTML to do the markup, not a programmer who thinks only the final appearance counts and semantics are for losers.

And we really shouldn't have to keep saying this but IT'S NOT:

language="javascript"

it's:

type="text/javascript"

Please stop coding like it's 1999 (or indeed before).

[Iskander]

It's great that you have given us the option to customise the box with our own text and background colours. But a type-in box allowing full customisation would be an excellent addition to the colour selection process.

That way, if we don't like any of the 23 colours you've provided we can just type our own hex code into the box. That way we can align the colour co-ordination of the box perfectly with our own colour schemes.

[Iskander]

The heading: "Flight Search" (it is a heading, isn't it? You haven't marked it up as such so we could be forgiven for thinking it something else).

Yes, it's great as a generic heading. But can we have the option to customise it, please?

Personally I have a number of different pages I would like to put the search box on and I would like to customise the heading every time to make it specific to each page.

[Iskander]

Hmmm... likewise that paragraph underneath.

Compare prices of flights from 100\'s of the UKs top
airlines and flight operators and book directly with them.

is just very generic. I'd like to write something page-specific for every box I have on my site.

[Iskander]

Any chance of branding? I'd like to be able to position my site's logo in the top right or bottom right corner of the 350x250 box?

Hmmm. Maybe you don't need to add that.
Thinking about it, I can do this anyway using CSS absolute-positioning.

[Iskander]

Okay, one thing I would LOVE is to be able to prepopulate the Going to field with a specific destination.

It would also be helpful to have the option to pre-select a departure airport in the Departing from field.

[Iskander]

One question:

Can Regions (such as "London Area") be selected in the Departing from field or are these just inactive headings?

I have had "no results" returned so many times that I am beginning to think they are just inactive headings. But they don't look like such. If I can't figure it out I'm sure my readers aren't going to be able to.

Incidentally, there are an awful lot of searches which just end in: "no results". Is this just teething problems?

[Iskander]

Returning to the theme of customisation, I love the Flight Search Results page - it's very close to deckchair and lastminute.com results - (well done!) - but we need to be able to customise the colours.

I selected bright yellow for my search box and the Results page came back with bright yellow heading backgrounds... and white text. Which is near-illegible.

Thanks for listening to (and hopefully taking on board) all of my suggestions for now. I hope this initiative is something which continues to develop, grow and improve with winning results for merchants, Affiliate Future and for affiliates.

If anyone else has some suggestions, please step forward and take the floor...

[pistol101]

Hi Iskander,

Thanks for the feedback, we have made all these changes now.

You may want to have a look at our web services, let me know if you'd like more information.

[freerock]

I still can't find the page where the code is? Am I missing something?

[pistol101]

If you go to product tools (main navigation) then flight search on the green bar you'll be able to follow the instructions.

If your interested in the web services you'll need to contact me.

[andysears]

So can I have this flight box set up to say only show flight to Barcelons Reus and Girona airports?

[mark707]

Okay, one thing I would LOVE is to be able to prepopulate the Going to field with a specific destination.

It would also be helpful to have the option to pre-select a departure airport in the Departing from field.

Any update on prepopulating the destination? I am working on a site which will concentrate on holidays to Majorca so the ability to prepopulate the destination would be a real bonus. I would particularly like it for the affiliate future holiday search white label as the present requirement to select Spain then Majorca is bound to put some people off.

Thanks
Mark