Hotel recommendation engine, Gekko, has just announced the launch of GekkoLinks – a new technology that will definitely be of interest to travel publishers (and other industries to come).
By automatically recognizing hotel names within a text – even non-exact or fuzzy references – Gekkolinks is able to supplement any online travel content site with information from Gekko’s hotel database. After recognizing the hotel, Gekkolinks transforms the name into an affiliate link and supplies additional information and prices from multiple booking engines in the form of an Apture-like popup. Readers can thus make hotel reservations without ever leaving the publishers site – who in turn makes money off of the affiliate hotel booking. So everyone from travel bloggers to large media sites can monetize hotel references in their texts without doing more than adding a simple line of javascript to their website. Sweet.
Gekko’s database currently counts over 140,000 hotels in 184 countries. Aside from the launch of GekkoLinks, the 10-person company also provides a hotel recommendation engine that allows users to search hotels based on previous hotels they’ve liked.
For the moment, Gekkolinks functions in English but when it comes down to it, most of the time hotel names are hotel names. Interested publishers can already sign up for the beta of the patent-pending technology.