Expedia.com Expedia.com Partners with Be Free, Inc. To Bring Expedia Associates Program to New Levels
Affiliate Sites Earn Commissions for Referring Airline, Hotel and Car Rental Bookings to Award-Winning Travel Site
MARLBOROUGH, MA, June 25, 2000 – Be Free, Inc. (Nasdaq: BFRE), the leader of performance marketing, today announced that Expedia, Inc. (Nasdaq: EXPE), a leader in online travel has joined its growing and diverse list of industry-leading performance marketing customers. The Expedia.com® Associates Program (EAP) will provide the most comprehensive compensation structure among online travel agencies. Potential affiliates can sign up for EAP at http://www.expedia.com/daily/associates/Default.asp.
The Expedia.com Associates Program offers a unique and comprehensive revenue-share program with compensation for qualifying airline tickets, hotel rooms, car rental and accepted requests made through the Price Matcher™ product line. With Expedia.com's award-winning travel services, affiliates can be assured that they're providing visitors with the industry's best travel services. Affiliates place a link to Expedia.com on their sites, and earn commissions for every sale referred to their links. Be Free is a full-service performance marketing partner, providing the infrastructure for the program, from tracking and reporting to tools and services for channel management. The result is more revenue opportunities for the affiliate sites and increased sales for Expedia.com—a win-win situation.
“Online travel is the largest ecommerce category and, with growth projected by Forrester Research from $14 billion in 2000 to $32 billion by 2004, it still has a huge market potential,” said Gordon Hoffstein, chairman and CEO of Be Free, Inc. “By using Be Free's performance marketing services, Expedia.com is utilizing an additional channel to raise awareness of the site and drive additional sales with affiliate partners.”
“Be Free has a proven track record at building, managing and scaling affiliate programs, including our already very successful program at Travelscape.com,” said Erik Blachford, vice president of marketing for Expedia, Inc. “This partnership will enable us to grow the Expedia.com Associates Program more rapidly and broadly distribute Expedia®'s unparalleled travel services to consumers.”
About Performance Marketing
Performance marketing allows online marketers like Expedia.com to increase sales, drive traffic, generate qualified leads and extend brand reach, all while paying only for the performance of their promotions. By paying only for results, marketers lower their customer acquisition costs and increase the power of their marketing budget. Be Free offers the only truly customer-focused approach to performance marketing, producing superior overall results for its customers and enabling cross-promotions and cooperative marketing. In addition, Be Free offers a full-service suite of performance marketing services, from leading edge and scaleable infrastructure and tracking technology, to reliable reporting and channel management tools, to industry knowledge and value added services.
About Expedia, Inc.
Expedia, Inc. (Nasdaq: EXPE) operates Expedia.com, a leading online Web site in the United States with localized versions for travelers in Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. To help customers travel right, Expedia.com provides the best combination of air, car and hotel booking, vacation package and cruise offers, destination information, and point-to-point mapping. Expedia's quality and leadership was recognized through several awards, includingagree Expedia is the online travel leader. This year, Expedia.com was awarded PC Magazine's Editors' Choice, Yahoo! Internet Life's “Best Overall Travel Site,” Gomez Advisors' “Number One Travel Site for Spring 2000” and PC World's 2000 World Class Award for Best Travel Site.
Expedia.com customers are supported by a credit card guarantee (U.S. site only), privacy policy, and live agents via e-mail and an 800-number available 24 hours a day/seven days a week. Expedia.com is also available under Travel on the MSN® network of Internet services.
About Be Free, Inc.
Be Free, Inc. (NASDAQ: BFRE) is the leader in performance marketing—the next generation of online marketing. Be Free helps its customers build and manage uniquely branded online sales channels, enabling these sites to capture revenue by driving site traffic, generating qualified leads and selling products in context on locations throughout the Web. Be Free's customers include some of the Internet's leading merchants, online services and portals such as IBM (NYSE: IBM), America Online, Inc. (NYSE: AOL), barnesandnoble.com (Nasdaq: BNBN), GoTo.com (Nasdaq: GOTO), Mercata, C|Net (Nasdaq: CNET), Garden.com (Nasdaq: GDEN), PC Connection (Nasdaq: PCCC), Lycos (Nasdaq: LCOS), About.com (Nasdaq: BOUT) and Yahoo!® GeoCities (Nasdaq: YHOO). Affiliates can enroll in performance marketing programs using Be Free's technology with a streamlined application form called FastApp, located at http://www.reporting.net/networks/affiliates/bf_fast_app.
Founded in 1996, Be Free has offices in Marlborough, Massachusetts; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Atlanta, Georgia; Chicago, Illinois; Los Angeles, California, Culver City, CA, Campbell, CA; Austin, Texas; Silver Spring, Maryland; Seattle, Washington; New York, New York; and Windsor, UK. For more information, visit http://www.befree.com.
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