ATG Helps Online Travel Companies Build Stronger Relationships as Consumers Prepare for Heavy Summer Travel Season
Personalized Cross-selling and up-selling, split testing of campaigns among winning strategies offered by commerce leader
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 28, 2004--
With the online travel industry bracing for the busy summer travel season, ATG (Art Technology Group, Inc., NASDAQ: ARTG), the software provider behind the Web's richest customer experiences, offered helpful tips to the industry to help vendors in all categories of online travel create the deepest and most mutually beneficial customer experience with consumers visiting their sites.
According to the Travel Industry Association (TIA), summer travel is expected to increase 3.2 percent over the summer of 2003, serving as a boon to the $552 million U.S. travel industry. The online sector in particular, which consumer behavior consultancy comScore recently reported was the highest-grossing retail category on the Web in 2003, is projected to take in $40.7 billion in purchases. Studies from the Travel Industry Association and eMarketer's Travel Industry Worldwide Report showed that of the 64 million U.S. adults that went online for travel information in 2003, nearly 66 percent made travel purchases.
"The travel industry is one in which the online channel has not only become a productive part of a company's multi-channel strategy, but it is woven into everyday consumer habits and, in some cases it is surpassing traditional forms of booking travel," said Cliff Conneighton, senior vice president of marketing, ATG. "This new dynamic places even greater importance on creating a robust, guided customer experience that presents these Web-savvy group of consumers with as many personalized options as possible."
Conneighton offers the following tips for online travel companies as the summer season approaches:
Up-sell and Cross-sell, there's never a better time: The TIA estimates that travelers plan on spending an average of $1,101 on their longest pleasure trip this summer, up 4.4 percent from 2003. This presents online travel vendors with a golden opportunity to create personalized scenarios designed to present travelers with additional buying options as they plan their trips.
Test your campaigns: Recent advancements in commerce software have made it possible for marketers to conduct comparative testing of multiple campaigns simultaneously, giving business users a keener insight into the types of campaigns and strategies that are resonating with online customers.
Make it easy, make it personal: Recently, commerce vendors have begun to combine many self-service capabilities with the personalization techniques that have fueled online commerce since its inception. This can be an important tool and deepen the trust of a customer, particularly travel customers that visit sites with frequency.
ATG provides the online commerce technology behind some of the travel industry's most notable brands, including InterContinental Hotels Group, Hyatt and American Airlines.
About ATG
ATG (Art Technology Group, Inc., NASDAQ: ARTG) delivers innovative software to help high-end consumer-facing companies create a richer, more adaptive interactive experience for their customers and partners online and via other channels. ATG has delivered category-leading e-business solutions to many of the world's best-known brands including A&E Television, Aetna Services, Inc., Alcatel, American Airlines, Barclays Global Investors, Best Buy, BMG Direct, Eastman Kodak, Ford Motor Credit, HSBC, Hyatt, J.Crew, Merrill Lynch, Newell Rubbermaid, Target, U.S. Army, Walgreen Company and Wells Fargo. The company is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with additional locations throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information about ATG, please visit www.atg.com.
ATG and Art Technology Group are registered trademarks of Art Technology Group, Inc. All other product names, service marks, and trademarks mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.
This press release contains forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Important risk factors affecting business generally may be found in periodic reports and registration statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission at www.sec.gov. Risk factors related to the subject matter of this press release include the possibility that the ATG product deployment will not be successful, on time or significantly enhance the user's Internet experience or handle user volumes; that those customers leveraging ATG won't have the opportunity to increase revenue and decrease future costs; the need to adapt to rapid changes so products do not become obsolete; the possibility of errors in ATG's software products; the possibility that the solution will not make customer implementations faster or more flexible or permit the customer to meet its customer-facing or infrastructure requirements; that the ATG product will not continue to be integrated with third party applications servers or will not support all Web services enabled systems; that ATG's product strategy may change in the future; and the risks and costs of intellectual property litigation. ATG undertakes no obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements after the date of this press release.
Contacts
ATG
Tucker Walsh, 617/386-1159
twalsh@atg.com
or
PAN Communications
Jerry Griffin, 978/474-1900
atg@pancomm.com
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