Retail travel chain, Helloworld, will move its current website helloworld.com.au to a new platform on August 31 as its strategic alliance agreement with Orbitz Worldwide comes to an end.

Helloworld CEO, Andrew Burnes, said the strategic alliance between Helloworld and Expedia-owned platform, Orbitz, had not delivered the revenue streams initially envisaged by both parties and had created too much conflict with Helloworld’s branded and associate members.

“While helloworld.com.au, utilising the Orbitz technology, has been in one sense a success in that it attracted a lot of new online customers to the portal, the financial investment by Helloworld Limited in its development is over $18 million to date,” said Burnes. “And between the ongoing losses of the .com operation and the channel conflict with the online site carrying the same brand as our branded and associate members, we have decided to transition the site to a more agent-aligned portal.”

Burnes said it is their responsibility to drive business in the door of their agency members, onto the phones of their agency members and onto the portals of their agency members including helloworld.com.au and their members should share in the commercial outcomes of those transactions in the same way.

He said despite the move, the features of the current portal will remain the same and will continue to provide transactional functionality for air, land, car hire and other travel products. Burnes said starting September, the main site will match microsites for individual agencies, allowing consultants to earn commissions that are equal to those made via walk-in customers.

“This operation has been costing about $6 million a year over the last two years plus capital expenditure and these losses will now come to an end as a result of the decision to transition to a new site and end the current Agreement,” he said.

Helloworld’s current agreement with ReadyRooms will also come to an end on August 31 and Burnes indicated the company will enter into a new agreement with Expedia Inc. for access to Expedia’s global hotel content via the Expedia Affiliate Network.

“Up until now, content has come from Orbitz and from our internal wholesale businesses however we are in the process of replacing the Orbitz content with Expedia content and bolstering our internal content by adding AOT’s significant content in Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific and the amount of available rooms on the ReadyRooms site will more than double once these two connections are complete,” Burnes said.

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