newbie questions on travel vertical

[wackimonki]

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I am having a stab at the travel vertical. I've got a few bugging questions that I would really appreciate some help on. I am mainly interested in flights right now.

What are some good flight programmes that allows direct linking?
I just read Expedia's comprehensive T&C on buy.at. After reading all that, I'm still not sure if direct linking is banned or not.

With direct linking, can I link with from and to flights options set?
i.e. travelmerchant.com/flights?from=A&to=B

Do merchants offer feeds containing flights from/to information?

Thanks in advance!

[sweetpete]

just to clarify - when you say direct linking you mean linking from search engines straight through to the merchant site with no landing page??

If so then the majority of larger flight programmes won't allow this, but dig around - i'm sure there are some. No reason why a decent landing page with relevant content (if targeted to individual routes) wouldn't convert for many merchants though.

[morleymouse]

Direct to merchant (search engine, our display URL and your affiliate link as the destination URL) is fine with alpharooms for hotels, flights, holidays, transfers, and anything else we sell

what you can pre set on a merchant site with your link is merchant specific. Ask them, and you'll find out. We've got links for flight thats will start a search (and are converting rather well!) you jsut need to fill in parts of the link such as to and from airport codes, dates etc.

Data - ask around. At the moment our flight data is limited, affiliates doing well are ones that have build up their own. Every airport has an official site, and that site will contain which airlines fly from that airport, and where to. Lot of airports - yes, lot of work - yes, worth it - oooh yes

[wackimonki]

Thanks for the responses guys.

Alpharoom sounds good. I'll be sure to check them out.

My thinking is to start off with direct linking and progress to landing pages. One thing I could do is to create a comparison site of comparison sites. On the landing page for a particular route, offer user a number of comparison sites he can go to. I'll have to look into this.

Otherwise, I am not sure I can display all flight information on my landing page. It will require a live feed of sort. Hum.

Thanks again.