Agoda.com Announced the Release Version of the BE3, A Free Booking Engine for Hotels

SINGAPORE (December 3, 2010) – Agoda.com, Asia’s global hotel booking site and part of Nasdaq-listed priceline.com Inc., today announced the release of BE3, a free booking engine for hotels, built around Agoda.com's Yield Control System (YCS) technology.

BE3 is a simple, no-frills booking engine that plugs into an existing hotel website. Available in 30 languages, the BE3 is designed for smaller independent hotels that may not be able to afford other services in the market.

The YCS, which is the backbone of BE3, is currently employed by thousands of hotels around the world to control hotel content, inventory, rates and promotions on Agoda.com. It is now available to selected small hotels to build their own direct channel free of charge.

Regarding the decision to make the product free, Agoda.com CEO and President Robert Rosenstein, explains, "Agoda has always felt hotels with their own web strategy make the best partners and can most appreciate what Agoda has to offer. BE3 technology supports both direct bookings and bookings that happen through the Agoda.com site."

Mr. Agung Sujana, owner of the Legian Village in Bali, Indonesia, implemented BE3 in September 2010. "BE3 is an effective way to manage instant bookings through our official website," said Mr. Sujana. "It is very easy to maintain room availability and rates through the Yield Control System, and BE3 is now considered our 24-hour reservation service."

Koh Samui's Atlantis Resort & Spa has also been using BE3 as its direct booking engine. The property's Reservations and Yield Manager, Ms Oratai Therskijmanuntachai, said, "Without the booking engine from Agoda, we never could have developed our direct channel so rapidly. Guests trust the secure environment of the booking engine to make the reservation and to provide all the details. The system is also very easy to manage for the reservations team. We are very happy with the growth we have seen so far in our direct bookings."

Mr. Rosenstein added, "At Agoda, we are always looking for ways to solve problems for our hotel partners, both big and small. BE3 is not going to solve the needs of large enterprises with substantial online share, but it will help some of the smaller Agoda partners that just are starting to experiment with direct online bookings.”

To better assist small regional hotels, BE3 is available in 30 languages: Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Traditional Chinese, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese.

Agoda will make an assessment of eligibility for BE3 based on an analysis of a hotel’s size and its marketing objectives. Eligible hotels are not charged for the use of BE3. To learn more about what’s required to start using BE3, visit www.Agoda.com/BE3.

Agoda Company Pte Ltd (www.agoda.com) is a leading Asia-based, online hotel reservations company, which specializes in securing the lowest discount hotel prices. Agoda.com is part of Priceline.com (Nasdaq:PCLN). Agoda's network includes more than 140,000 worldwide. The multinational staff of 500 professionals, located throughout the world, provides a first-rate reservation service that uniquely combines local knowledge and local connections to provide the best hotel deals to both business and leisure travelers.

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This release was published on openPR.